Need to present or allow for state import if something changes in the portal

[Deleted user]

Right, so I decided (because I'm testing) to delete a tag from the portal I'd previously provisioned via terraform, and then run terraform apply.

I get an error:

Getting an error is not entirely unreasonable given the circumstance (I deleted a resource that I'd created via terraform, so, fair), but what's the recommended recovery model here?

I managed to fix it by manually recreating the tag in the portal, then manually updating the tfstate file (🤮) with the ref from the new tag. On reflection, this was not the correct way to do it, I should probably run terraform state rm (docs).

Perhaps if one of our resources gives back a 404, the error message we throw can include information about running terraform state rm to forget about the object?

Originally posted by @enclave-alistair in #2 (comment)