Discovery with pre-existing environment

[JeroenSoeters]

What problem does this solve?

It is not clear from our documentation what the effect of --mode reconcile is on a forma that contains targets.

Proposed solution

Clarify this in the docs.

Discussed in #41

^{Originally posted by Arajap October 31, 2025}
Hello, I was going through the documentation in relation to discovery and have a question about this process.

To begin with discovery a target needs to be created using formae apply --mode reconcile target.pkl when i check the documentation for reconcile mode it tells me the following formae apply --mode reconcile compares your forma against actual infrastructure and brings reality in line with your code. Resources in your forma are created or updated. Resources that exist in AWS but not in your forma are destroyed.

I suppose my question is if this runs against a target with no Forma will this destroy the existing resources? or will this allow discovery without fear of destroying current resources?