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Migrate AWS Copilot CLI apps to Terraform, in place

ecsodus migrates applications deployed with the AWS Copilot CLI to Terraform-managed Amazon ECS, without moving traffic and without losing data. It is free and open source (Apache-2.0).

pipx install ecsodus      # or: uvx ecsodus --help
brew install moneytool/tap/ecsodus

How ecsodus migrates an AWS Copilot app to Terraform in place

Why you need more than "terraform import"

AWS ended support for the Copilot CLI on 2026-06-12, and archived the aws/copilot-cli repository on 2026-06-22. Your services keep running as CloudFormation stacks. To move them to Terraform you have to delete those stacks without deleting what they manage. Done naively, that destroys production:

  • Custom resources delete things. When their stack is deleted, Copilot's Lambda-backed custom resources delete ACM certificates, DNS alias and validation records, and NS delegations, and they empty the access-logs bucket. See what each Delete handler does.

  • Deleting the last service stack removes shared infrastructure. The env-controller then deletes the shared load balancer, the NAT gateways and the EFS file system from the environment stack.

  • Addon data has no protection. Addon databases and tables have no DeletionPolicy, so they are deleted along with the service stack.

  • --retain-resources doesn't help. It only works on stacks already in DELETE_FAILED.

Deleting Copilot stacks as-is versus after ecsodus retain patches

What ecsodus does

  1. Inventories your Copilot app, read-only.

  2. Generates Terraform with import blocks whose values are exactly what is deployed, so the first plan imports and changes nothing.

  3. Writes retain patches. They add DeletionPolicy: Retain to every resource in every stack, so deleting a stack can no longer delete anything or invoke a Delete handler.

  4. Writes a runbook in which every mutating step is gated by a machine check.

ecsodus check refusing unsafe steps and passing safe ones

This was verified on real AWS: a live Copilot app was migrated with 44/44 pure imports. All its Copilot stacks were deleted, the service kept serving, and the data survived (report).

Read the migration guide AWS Copilot end of support: your options

Not GitHub Copilot

This project is about the AWS Copilot CLI (copilot app/env/svc deploy), Amazon's command-line tool for containerized apps on ECS and App Runner. It has nothing to do with GitHub Copilot.