When using the enhanced remote backend, a subset of all Terraform
operations are supported. Of these, only plan and apply can be executed
on the remote infrastructure (e.g. Terraform Cloud). Other operations
run locally and use the remote backend for state storage.
This causes problems when the local version of Terraform does not match
the configured version from the remote workspace. If the two versions
are incompatible, an `import` or `state mv` operation can cause the
remote workspace to be unusable until a manual fix is applied.
To prevent this from happening accidentally, this commit introduces a
check that the local Terraform version and the configured remote
workspace Terraform version are compatible. This check is skipped for
commands which do not write state, and can also be disabled by the use
of a new command-line flag, `-ignore-remote-version`.
Terraform version compatibility is defined as:
- For all releases before 0.14.0, local must exactly equal remote, as
two different versions cannot share state;
- 0.14.0 to 1.0.x are compatible, as we will not change the state
version number until at least Terraform 1.1.0;
- Versions after 1.1.0 must have the same major and minor versions, as
we will not change the state version number in a patch release.
If the two versions are incompatible, a diagnostic is displayed,
advising that the error can be suppressed with `-ignore-remote-version`.
When this flag is used, the diagnostic is still displayed, but as a
warning instead of an error.
Commands which will not write state can assert this fact by calling the
helper `meta.ignoreRemoteBackendVersionConflict`, which will disable the
checks. Those which can write state should instead call the helper
`meta.remoteBackendVersionCheck`, which will return diagnostics for
display.
In addition to these explicit paths for managing the version check, we
have an implicit check in the remote backend's state manager
initialization method. Both of the above helpers will disable this
check. This fallback is in place to ensure that future code paths which
access state cannot accidentally skip the remote version check.
The short description of our commands (as shown in the main help output
from "terraform") was previously very inconsistent, using different
tense/mood for different commands. Some of the commands were also using
some terminology choices inconsistent with how we currently talk about
the related ideas in our documentation.
Here I've tried to add some consistency by first rewriting them all in
the imperative mood (except the ones that just are just subcommand
groupings), and tweaking some of the terminology to hopefully gel better
with how we present similar ideas in our recently-updated docs.
While working on this I inevitably spotted some similar inconsistencies
in the longer-form help output of some of the commands. I've not reviewed
all of these for consistency, but I did update some where the wording
was either left inconsstent with the short form changes I'd made or
where the prose stood out to me as particularly inconsistent with our
current usual documentation language style.
All of this is subjective, so I expect we'll continue to tweak these over
time as we continue to develop our documentation writing style based on
user questions and feedback.
Terraform Core expects all variables to be set, but for some ancillary
commands it's fine for them to just be set to placeholders because the
variable values themselves are not key to the command's functionality
as long as the terraform.Context is still self-consistent.
For such commands, rather than prompting for interactive input for
required variables we'll just stub them out as unknowns to reflect that
they are placeholders for values that a user would normally need to
provide.
This achieves a similar effect to how these commands behaved before, but
without the tendency to produce a slightly invalid terraform.Context that
would fail in strange ways when asked to run certain operations.
Any command using meta.defaultFlagSet *might* occasionally exit before
the flag package's output got written. This caused flag error messages
to get lost. This PR discards the flag package output in favor of
directly returning the error to the end user.
Alisdair McDiarmid