--- layout: "intro" page_title: "Destroy Infrastructure" sidebar_current: "gettingstarted-destroy" description: |- We've now seen how to build and change infrastructure. Before we move on to creating multiple resources and showing resource dependencies, we're going to go over how to completely destroy the Terraform-managed infrastructure. --- # Destroy Infrastructure We've now seen how to build and change infrastructure. Before we move on to creating multiple resources and showing resource dependencies, we're going to go over how to completely destroy the Terraform-managed infrastructure. Destroying your infrastructure is a rare event in production environments. But if you're using Terraform to spin up multiple environments such as development, test, QA environments, then destroying is a useful action. ## Plan Before destroying our infrastructure, we can use the plan command to see what resources Terraform will destroy. ``` $ terraform plan -destroy # ... - aws_instance.example ``` With the `-destroy` flag, we're asking Terraform to plan a destroy, where all resources under Terraform management are destroyed. You can use this output to verify exactly what resources Terraform is managing and will destroy. ## Destroy Let's destroy the infrastructure now: ``` $ terraform destroy aws_instance.example: Destroying... Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 1 destroyed. # ... ``` The `terraform destroy` command should ask you to verify that you really want to destroy the infrastructure. Terraform only accepts the literal "yes" as an answer as a safety mechanism. Once entered, Terraform will go through and destroy the infrastructure. Just like with `apply`, Terraform is smart enough to determine what order things should be destroyed. In our case, we only had one resource, so there wasn't any ordering necessary. But in more complicated cases with multiple resources, Terraform will destroy in the proper order. ## Next You now know how to create, modify, and destroy infrastructure from a local machine. Next, we move on to features that make Terraform configurations slightly more useful: [variables, resource dependencies, provisioning, and more](/intro/getting-started/dependencies.html).