Terraform force-unlock removes a state lock.
It does not repair infrastructure state consistency.
A stale lock may come from a crashed Terraform run, but it may also belong to an active apply operation still modifying infrastructure. Removing the lock too early can expose the environment to concurrent writes and state corruption risks.
This lesson walks through the operational checklist before using force-unlock:
- verifying active writers
- validating lock identity
- backing up state
- confirming post-unlock consistency
The focus is not the command syntax itself.
The focus is the recovery discipline surrounding the command.