Do not destroy the repository when you change the repository name

[smorimoto]

Is this intentional?

[jcudit]

Unintentional. We should support renaming a repository without having to destroy it. Will track this for the next batch of repository resource updates.

[smorimoto]

I also changed the local name at the same time, is that probably the cause? Ideally, even if you change both the local name and the repository name, it should not be destroyed.

[k24dizzle]

Hi, I went ahead and gave this a shot here: #699. Would appreciate any feedback!

[smorimoto]

Cool, I will take a look at it when I have much spare time 🙂

[majormoses]

This is actually quite an old issue and something that was not exactly intentional and more a set of unfortunate set of limitations of the (documented) api. See #55 for more information. I am excited to see this be a thing as I know it's come up a number of times at my org and it was always way more work then it should be to rename a resource.

[k24dizzle]

Seems like the main issue here is that the github_repository resource uses the name as the id of the resource, which we want to change, rather than the repo_id which shouldn't change.

I wonder how far we could get by removing the ForceNew attribute from the name field. In my testing (in my PR above), removing that allows you to rename a repository. Behind the scenes, it will assign the resource a new id, since there is a new name, but are there any implications of changing the id of a terraform resource?

cc: @jcudit

[jcudit]

Removing (or making configurable) the ForceNew is a reasonable first step to get this functionality. My worry too is with unforeseen effects of changing the ID of a repository resource. I recommend we enable this behaviour defaulted to off so that consumers can test or ignore the feature at their judgement.

Aiming to land some suggestions on the attached PR to keep it moving.

[devinrsmith]

I think this issues has been fixed by #699

I've planned out a run, and now I see github_repository being updated in-place :)

Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of other resources that reference the repository name, and would be better served by referencing a repository id (#744).

From our own usage, we see the following resources planned to be destroyed during a repo rename: github_branch, github_branch_default, github_branch_protection_v3, github_repository_collaborator, and github_team_repository. (There are probably other relevant resources that need to be updated, that we don't use.)

I'm assuming I'll need to go through a rename and manual import step instead of a normal terraform apply to resolve this currently.

[jcudit]

Thanks for pointing this out. I'll get #744 prioritized.

[github-actions]

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[Caleb-Hoffman]

Hi @kfcampbell, just curious if there are any updates on this?

[mwarkentin]

@Caleb-Hoffman according to #55 I think this might be resolved?

[kfcampbell]

Closing as #55 is closed; please let me know if this is not the case.