Overview

Terraform sometimes reports changes that won’t actually modify infrastructure. These “phantom” changes appear because of serialization differences, provider normalization, or state representation quirks. terraform-ui detects and filters them so you can focus on real changes.

How It Works

A phantom change is an update action where the before and after values are semantically identical. Common causes:

Null vs absent – a field stored as null in state but omitted in the plan
Array ordering – tags or list attributes serialized in different orders
Provider normalization – trailing slashes, case differences, whitespace
Computed attribute refresh – values that get re-read but haven’t changed

terraform-ui normalizes both sides of a change before comparing:

Strip null values – treats null as equivalent to missing
Sort arrays – compares arrays by content regardless of order
Recursive normalization – handles nested objects and arrays
Deep equality – compares the normalized structures

If the normalized before and after are identical, the change is marked as phantom.

In the TUI

Phantom changes are:

Visually dimmed in the plan review
Shown with a phantom indicator
Collapsible/hideable via filter
Excluded from risk analysis by default

Press P from the home screen after running a plan to see only phantom changes with explanations.

In Non-Interactive Mode

tfui show -json tfplan.out | tfui phantom -json | jq '.phantom_changes'

Output:

{
  "phantom_changes": 2,
  "real_changes": 5,
  "phantom_resources": [
    "aws_security_group.web",
    "aws_iam_role.lambda_exec"
  ]
}

Configuration

# tfui.hcl
plugin "phantom" {
  enabled = true
}

Phantom detection is built-in and not currently configurable. See the Phantom Changes plugin for the full TUI reference.