We have a few different .proto files in this repository that all need to
get recompiled into .pb.go files each time we change them, but we were
previously handling that with some scripts that just assumed that protoc
and the relevant plugins were already installed on the system somewhere,
at the right versions.
In practice we've been constantly flopping between different versions of
these tools due to folks having different versions installed in their
development environments. In particular, the state of the .pb.go files
in the prior commit wasn't reproducible by any single version of the tools
because they've all slightly diverged from one another.
In the interests of being more consistent here and avoiding accidental
inconsistencies, we'll now centralize the protocol buffer compile steps
all into a single tool that knows how to fetch and install the expected
versions of the various tools we need and then run those tools with the
right options to get a stable result.
If we want to upgrade to either a newer protoc or a newer protoc-gen-go
in future then we'll do that in a central location and update all of the
.pb.go files at the same time, so that we're always consistently tracking
the same version of protocol buffers everywhere.
While doing this I attempted to keep as close as possible to the toolchain
we'd most recently used, but since they were not consistent with each
other they've now all changed which version numbers they record at minimum,
and the planproto stub in particular now also has a slightly different
descriptor serialization but is otherwise offering the same API.
Implement a new provider_meta block in the terraform block of modules, allowing provider-keyed metadata to be communicated from HCL to provider binaries.
Bundled in this change for minimal protocol version bumping is the addition of markdown support for attribute descriptions and the ability to indicate when an attribute is deprecated, so this information can be shown in the schema dump.
Co-authored-by: Paul Tyng <paul@paultyng.net>
Add versioned tfplugin proto files to the docs directory, for easier
reference. The latest version starts as a symlink to the current
file used for generated the tfplugin package in ./internal/tfplugin5.
When changing the protocol version, the old file must be copied to
./docs/plugin-protocol/, and a new symlink created for the latest
version.
Private data was previously created during Plan, and sent back to the
provider during Apply. This data also needs to be persisteded accross
Read calls, but rather than rely on core for that we can send the data
to the provider during Read to allow for more flexibilty.
In study of existing providers we've found a pattern we werent previously
accounting for of using a nested block type to represent a group of
arguments that relate to a particular feature that is always enabled but
where it improves configuration readability to group all of its settings
together in a nested block.
The existing NestingSingle was not a good fit for this because it is
designed under the assumption that the presence or absence of the block
has some significance in enabling or disabling the relevant feature, and
so for these always-active cases we'd generate a misleading plan where
the settings for the feature appear totally absent, rather than showing
the default values that will be selected.
NestingGroup is, therefore, a slight variation of NestingSingle where
presence vs. absence of the block is not distinguishable (it's never null)
and instead its contents are treated as unset when the block is absent.
This then in turn causes any default values associated with the nested
arguments to be honored and displayed in the plan whenever the block is
not explicitly configured.
The current SDK cannot activate this mode, but that's okay because its
"legacy type system" opt-out flag allows it to force a block to be
processed in this way anyway. We're adding this now so that we can
introduce the feature in a future SDK without causing a breaking change
to the protocol, since the set of possible block nesting modes is not
extensible.
Due to the inprecision of our shimming from the legacy SDK type system to
the new Terraform Core type system, the legacy SDK produces a number of
inconsistencies that produce only minor quirky behavior or broken
edge-cases. To retain compatibility with those existing weird behaviors,
the legacy SDK opts out of our safety checks.
The intent here is to allow existing providers to continue to do their
previous unsafe behaviors for now, accepting that this will allow certain
quirky bugs from previous releases to persist, and then gradually migrate
away from the legacy SDK and remove this opt-out on a per-resource basis
over time.
As with the apply-time safety check opt-out, this is reserved only for
the legacy SDK and must not be used in any new SDK implementations. We
still include any inconsistencies as warnings in the logs as an aid to
anyone debugging weird behavior, so that they can see situations where
blame may be misplaced in the user-visible error messages.
The shim layer for the legacy SDK type system is not precise enough to
guarantee it will produce identical results between plan and apply. In
particular, values that are null during plan will often become zero-valued
during apply.
To avoid breaking those existing providers while still allowing us to
introduce this check in the future, we'll introduce a rather-hacky new
flag that allows the legacy SDK to signal that it is the legacy SDK and
thus disable the check.
Once we start phasing out the legacy SDK in favor of one that natively
understands our new type system, we can stop setting this flag and thus
get the additional safety of this check without breaking any
previously-released providers.
No other SDK is permitted to set this flag, and we will remove it if we
ever introduce protocol version 6 in future, assuming that any provider
supporting that protocol will always produce consistent results.
The main significant change here is that the package name for the proto
definition is "tfplugin5", which is important because this name is part
of the wire protocol for references to types defined in our package.
Along with that, we also move the generated package into "internal" to
make it explicit that importing the generated Go package from elsewhere is
not the right approach for externally-implemented SDKs, which should
instead vendor the proto definition they are using and generate their
own stubs to ensure that the wire protocol is the only hard dependency
between Terraform Core and plugins.
After this is merged, any provider binaries built against our
helper/schema package will need to be rebuilt so that they use the new
"tfplugin5" package name instead of "proto".
In a future commit we will include more elaborate and organized
documentation on how an external codebase might make use of our RPC
interface definition to implement an SDK, but the primary concern here
is to ensure we have the right wire package name before release.
Martin Atkins