Catch the config drift between your Terraform environments before it causes a "worked in staging, broke in prod" incident — right inside VS Code.

Infrastructure is usually defined per environment (dev.tfvars, staging.tfvars, prod.tfvars). Over time these silently diverge: a variable is added to one env but not another, or a risky flag like enable_deletion_protection is true in prod but false everywhere else. Env Drift compares them all and tells you.

Features

📊 Environment matrix — every variable as a row, every environment as a column, so you see all values side-by-side. Run “Env Drift: Show Environment Matrix.”
🔴 Missing-variable detection — a key defined in some environments but not others is flagged inline.
🟠 Suspicious drift — high-risk keys (security/feature flags, booleans) that differ across environments are surfaced as warnings.
🟢 Expected differences — region, account_id, *_arn, etc. are ignored by default (configurable) so you only see real problems.
🧩 Schema validation against variables.tf — cross-checks each *.tfvars against the variable "..." {} declarations in nearby .tf files:
- undeclared keys (almost always a typo Terraform would warn about), and
- required variables (no default) not set in an environment. This catches "would this even terraform apply?" bugs, not just drift.
✅ Status bar — live count of drift issues; click to open the matrix.
🔗 Click any value in the matrix to jump to that line in the right env file.

How it classifies each key

Status	Meaning	Flagged?
`missing`	defined in some envs, absent in others	✅ info
`suspicious`	risky key (or boolean) with differing values	✅ warning
`different`	values differ (often legitimate: sizes, names)	shown only
`same`	identical everywhere	shown only
`ignored`	matched an ignore pattern (expected to differ)	no

Settings

Setting	Default	What it does
`envDrift.enabled`	`true`	Master switch
`envDrift.files`	`*/.tfvars`	Which files are environments
`envDrift.exclude`	`/.terraform/`	Paths to skip
`envDrift.ignoreKeys`	region/account_id/…	Keys expected to differ
`envDrift.suspiciousKeyPattern`	enable/protect/encrypt/…	High-risk key regex
`envDrift.validateAgainstVariables`	`true`	Check tfvars against `variables.tf` (typos + required vars)

Each *.tfvars file is treated as one environment (named after the file, or its parent folder for generic names like terraform.tfvars).

Install (locally)

This extension isn't on the Marketplace — install the prebuilt .vsix directly.

Download env-drift-0.1.0.vsix from the latest release.
Install it:
```
code --install-extension env-drift-0.1.0.vsix
```
Or in VS Code: Extensions panel → ⋯ menu → Install from VSIX… → pick the file.
Reload VS Code. Open a folder with *.tfvars files and look for the Env Drift item in the status bar.

Prefer building from source? See Develop / run below.

Develop / run

npm install
npm run compile
npm test        # parser + differ unit tests

Press F5 to launch an Extension Development Host — it opens the bundled samples/ folder (dev/staging/prod with deliberate drift) so you can see it work immediately. Look for the Env Drift item in the status bar.