Rule IDs change when I modify a ruleset

Last updated Apr 21, 2026 For cloudflare_ruleset ↗︎ resources, the Cloudflare provider may delete a rule and create a new one when you modify a ruleset in your Terraform configuration. This happens because the API cannot match rules in your new Terraform configuration with existing rules in your Cloudflare configuration. Modifying a ruleset in your Terraform configuration and applying the changes will create new rules with different rule IDs in your Cloudflare account or zone.

This behavior may have an impact on any automation or monitoring systems you may have configured that rely on having immutable rule IDs between rule modifications.

How to keep the same rule ID between modifications

To keep existing rule IDs when making changes to a ruleset through Terraform, add a ref field to each rule.

The ref field is a user-defined external identifier that must be unique for each rule in a ruleset. When you provide a ref value, the provider will match the rule in your updated Terraform configuration with the existing rule with the same ref external identifier, and the rule ID will be preserved.

ref values have a string data type with a minimum length of one character. For example, my_ref.

Once you set the ref field of a rule, changing the ref field value will make Terraform create a new rule.

cf-terraforming support for ref field values

By default, when you create a rule, its ref value will be equal to the rule ID. You can set ref values via Cloudflare API.

When you import your existing Cloudflare configuration to Terraform using cf-terraforming ↗︎, the generated Terraform configuration will have ref values for each rule, with the same value as the rule ID.

If you manually created your Terraform configuration and your rules' configuration does not have a ref field, add a ref field to each rule so that each ruleset modification does not generate new rule IDs.

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