Question

A teammate's CI pipeline running 'terraform apply' against an S3 backend with DynamoDB locking crashed midway due to a network failure. Now every subsequent 'terraform plan' fails with an error indicating the state is locked, even though no operation is actually running. After confirming with the team that no apply is in progress, what is the recommended way to resolve this?

Accepted Answer

Run 'terraform force-unlock <LOCK_ID>' using the lock ID reported in the error message to release the stale lock

Answer

Manually delete the state file from the S3 bucket and re-run 'terraform init' to regenerate it

Answer

Add '-lock=false' permanently to all Terraform commands to avoid the locking mechanism entirely

Answer

Delete the DynamoDB table so Terraform stops tracking locks and recreates it on the next apply