Allow reapply default branch without PR

[MichaelKora]

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Overview of the Issue

I manage my infrastructure with Atlantis, and it works well. The only drawback is that if the infrastructure changes and I want to re-apply the default branch, I'll need create a dummy PR.

It would be useful to be able to re-apply the configuration on the default branch without PR, as it has already been merged using the Atlantis workflow.

Atlantis, according to the documentation, does not support this. Is there an effective method to archive that?

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Environment details

Atlantis on Cloud Run
GitHub as VCS
Atlantis image: runatlantis/atlantis:v0.23.3

[brandon-fryslie]

This would be great and ver useful, but seems technically difficult since it seems like anyone could apply the Terraform at any time on any closed PR.

[jamengual]

yes, this could be pretty dangerous, so I'm wondering what is the usecase here? drift detection?

[MichaelKora]

@jamengual yes the ideal would be to have drift detection. But actually am really just trying to re-apply the main. The Atlantis API seems to be a secured and reasonable approach(since it authenticates requests using the api-secret), the only issue am having with that is {"error":"failed to build command: checking if workspace exists: stat /home/atlantis/.atlantis/repos/..../0/default: no such file or directory"}

Seems like it's not able to create a workspace for the main branch ("PR":0).

As soon as i passed a valid PR, it works fine but that's not the goal and it also does not make any sense in my case to use the API for the PRs.

Here's my request:

curl --request POST ''"$the_url"'/api/plan' \
--header 'X-Atlantis-Token: '"$the_sec"'' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "Repository": "'"$the_repo"'",
    "Ref": "main",
    "Type": "Github",
    "Paths": [{ 
        "Directory": ".",
        "Workspace": "default" 
    }],
    "PR": 0
}'

[MichaelKora]

@jamengual seems like you had a similar issue(#2949) and it seems like the proposed solution (#3584) has not been merged yet

[jamengual]

we need to review that PR, we will get to it.

[MichaelKora]

i think that will fix my issue.