Lifecycle Meta-Arguments

The lifecycle meta-argument allows you to customize resource lifecycle behavior directly from main.yml or domain configuration files.

---

1. prevent_destroy

Prevents accidental destruction of critical test cases, plans, or test runs. Following Terraform conventions, lifecycle is declared inside the resource: block:

# main.yml or resource.yml
resource:
  testcase:
    match: "features/*.case.feature"
    lifecycle:
      prevent_destroy: true

Or directly on individual scenarios via Gherkin tags:

@tc-1 @smoke
@prevent_destroy
Scenario: Critical authentication

When active, running testform destroy or generating a plan that marks the resource for destruction will halt execution immediately with an error:

Error: Instance cannot be destroyed
Resource github_testcase.auth/login.case.feature.@tc-1 has lifecycle.prevent_destroy set.

---

2. ignore_changes

Suppresses drift detection for specific volatile attributes (e.g. labels, title, assignees):

# main.yml or resource.yml
resource:
  testrun:
    match: "suites/*.run.feature"
    lifecycle:
      ignore_changes:
        - labels
        - assignees

Or via Gherkin tag:

@tr-1
@ignore_changes("labels", "assignees")
Scenario: Smoke Suite Execution

Attributes listed in ignore_changes will be ignored during testform plan, testform diff, and state refresh calculations.