Avoiding conflicts when using github provider to create repositories and labels?

[larsks]

I'm using (well, trying to use) OpenTofu to manage the repository configuration for a github organization. My plan was to use github_repository to create the repositories, and github_issue_labels to manage a common set of labels on all the repositories. It sounds simple, but I immediately ran into a problem:

• github_repository successfully creates the repository
• This includes a set of default labels
• These labels immediately conflict with the ones I would like to apply using github_issue_labels

I can't import the labels before running tofu apply because the repository doesn't exist at that point, so the only workflow that succeeds is:

• Run tofu apply and wait for it to fail
• Run tofu import for the appropriate github_issue_labels resource
• Re-run tofu apply, which will now run without errors.

This makes the process very difficult to automate, since (a) you have to expect a failure, and (b) you need to know what resources to import.

This seems like it ought to be simple, but I'm new to OpenTofu/Terraform. Am I missing something?

[abstractionfactory]

Having done this in the past, I think this is a problem with the GitHub provider. Normally, you would want the labels to be not created by default and then create them yourself, but this does not seem possible.

I think this is covered in integrations/terraform-provider-github#2089, I would suggest upvoting and commenting on this issue so the devs see that this is a problem.

[larsks]

Thanks for the pointer to the issue! I see there's an unreviewed pull request that has been sitting around since October that purports to fix the problem. ☹️ Hopefully that gets picked up soon! I've worked around the problem by switching to github_issue_label for now, which is more robust in the face of pre-existing labels.