review-planned-changes.md

title	Review planned changes
description	Read what one plan proposes, what drift it reports, and what changes remain once both are combined.

One plan answers three questions, and Rootform keeps them apart: what the plan proposes, what drift it reports, and what remains once the two combine. You read all three in the summary, the Markdown report, or the Explorer.

The examples use the commerce platform plan from the quickstart; your own plan.json and plan.tfplan work the same way.

Read the three views

Analyze the plan without serving the Explorer to read the summary in the terminal:

rootform run plan.json --plan-file plan.tfplan --no-serve

�[1m�[38;5;208mPlanned changes�[0m
  Refreshed -> Planned
  �[2mInstances�[0m      1 added, 3 removed, 1 planned for replacement
�[1m�[38;5;208mReported drift�[0m
  No drift reported in this plan.
�[1m�[38;5;208mNet change�[0m
  Same determined changes as Planned changes.

Heading	Compares	Question it answers
Planned changes	Refreshed to Planned	What does this plan propose to change?
Reported drift	Recorded to Refreshed	What changed outside Terraform, according to the plan's drift records?
Net change	Recorded to Planned	What remains once drift the plan reverts cancels out?

This sample plan was made against the existing state, so Planned changes lists what it adds, removes, or replaces, no drift is reported, and Net change repeats Planned changes. A plan made against existing state lists drift records under Reported drift with their architectural consequence, and Net change shows a cancelled entry for each fact drift removed and the plan restores. See drift cancel in the net change walks through such a plan.

"No drift reported in this plan" means the export contains no drift record, not that infrastructure is unchanged: the plan may have run with -refresh=false or a narrowed scope, and the export does not record how far refresh went. The summary says "The export does not establish the refresh scope" for that reason.

Read the change list

The terminal lists added and removed resource instances and changed Relations, Contexts and Contributions, using a pager for a long report. --details adds depth to each entry. Markdown shows a bounded preview unless you request --details; folded lists alone do not make it exhaustive. Indeterminate closures are counted separately: a fact whose evidence cannot settle on one side is neither added nor removed, and never counts as unchanged.

For a pull request, write the same content as a Markdown report:

rootform run plan.json --plan-file plan.tfplan --no-serve -o review.md

The report leads with the totals, keeps the three headings, and folds long lists so a reviewer sees the shape first. Review with Markdown explains its layout and how --details expands it.

See each change in place

Open the plan in the Explorer with rootform run plan.json --plan-file plan.tfplan. The selector at the top left names the current view, starting with Planned changes and offering Reported drift and Net change when the plan holds those stages. The reading block at the bottom left picks one side or the difference: Refreshed, Changes, or Planned. Beside it, the Added, Removed, Changed, and Indeterminate filters narrow the canvas. Positions stay put when you switch views, so a change is easy to locate.

The About this view button beside the selector states what the view compares, its totals, and any limit that changes how to read it, such as instances the plan did not evaluate. What does this plan change? covers the controls in detail.

Keep the questions apart

A plan's own views compare stages of one Form. Comparing two plans, two states, or two saved Forms with --diff is a different operation: its result is Differences between two inputs, and it is never drift. Compare two Forms covers that comparison and Comparisons and drift owns the model behind both.