Adopting an existing project - Sponson

Most projects already have environment variables in the Vercel dashboard, a long-lived Neon branch or allowed callback URLs. Sponson does not need to recreate them. sponson init adopts them into the plan.

Run init

sponson init            # first run: writes a starter release.plan.yaml
sponson init            # later runs: appends lines for resources no scope manages
sponson plan            # nothing live changes: adopted lines are unchanged

sponson plan lists resources the plan does not know about as unmanaged drift, and never touches them. To adopt one at a time, pass its key: sponson init --adopt <key>. The keys are in sponson plan --json, under drift.

What adoption writes

Adopted variables are written as { keep: true }, which means “whatever value is live”. The value is never copied into the repository, and an adopted resource is never destroyed, not even by sponson apply --destroy. Replace { keep: true } with a literal or a reference when you want Sponson to manage the value from then on.

The value form: { keep: true } in the plan format.
A complete plan as init writes it: Examples.
Why it works this way: ADR 0007.