How to manage Terraform import IDs separately per workspace?

Question

Terraform 1.5 introduced import blocks for "config-driven import". This allows plan/apply operations to seamlessly manage the state of your preexisting infrastructure if you simply provide the import ID values as part of your configuration.

Example import block:

import {
  to = aws_instance.example
  id = "i-abcd1234"
}

This appears to be a huge step forward for tasks and workflows in which the state is not already under management by a Terraform state backend¹. However, when using Workspaces to differentiate between deployment instances, each config resource will have a unique ID per workspace. It isn't clear that there's a clean way to specify these unique ID values.

How can we specify unique ID values per workspace?

Answer 1

How can we specify unique ID values per workspace?

This is currently not possible as far as I can tell, because you cannot use variables in the import block. I've opened a GitHub issue for this https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/33383.

There's also another open issue https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/33380 which proposes a workspace parameter for the block, which if implemented would effectively be an alternative to my proposal.