Previously we had three different layers all thinking they were
responsible for substituting a default value for an unset root module
variable:
- the local backend, via logic in backend.ParseVariableValues
- the context.Plan function (and other similar functions) trying to
preprocess the input variables using
terraform.mergeDefaultInputVariableValues .
- the newer prepareFinalInputVariableValue, which aims to centralize all
of the variable preparation logic so it can be common to both root and
child module variables.
The second of these was also trying to handle type constraint checking,
which is also the responsibility of the central function and not something
we need to handle so early.
Only the last of these consistently handles both root and child module
variables, and so is the one we ought to keep. The others are now
redundant and are causing prepareFinalInputVariableValue to get a slightly
corrupted view of the caller's chosen variable values.
To rectify that, here we remove the two redundant layers altogether and
have unset root variables pass through as cty.NilVal all the way to the
central prepareFinalInputVariableValue function, which will then handle
them in a suitable way which properly respects the "nullable" setting.
This commit includes some test changes in the terraform package to make
those tests no longer rely on the mergeDefaultInputVariableValues logic
we've removed, and to instead explicitly set cty.NilVal for all unset
variables to comply with our intended contract for PlanOpts.SetVariables,
and similar. (This is so that we can more easily catch bugs in callers
where they _don't_ correctly handle input variables; it allows us to
distinguish between the caller explicitly marking a variable as unset vs.
not describing it at all, where the latter is a bug in the caller.)
Previously we had a significant discrepancy between these two situations:
we wrote the raw root module variables directly into the EvalContext and
then applied type conversions only at expression evaluation time, while
for child modules we converted and validated the values while visiting
the variable graph node and wrote only the _final_ value into the
EvalContext.
This confusion seems to have been the root cause for #29899, where
validation rules for root module variables were being applied at the wrong
point in the process, prior to type conversion.
To fix that bug and also make similar mistakes less likely in the future,
I've made the root module variable handling more like the child module
variable handling in the following ways:
- The "raw value" (exactly as given by the user) lives only in the graph
node representing the variable, which mirrors how the _expression_
for a child module variable lives in its graph node. This means that
the flow for the two is the same except that there's no expression
evaluation step for root module variables, because they arrive as
constant values from the caller.
- The set of variable values in the EvalContext is always only "final"
values, after type conversion is complete. That in turn means we no
longer need to do "just in time" conversion in
evaluationStateData.GetInputVariable, and can just return the value
exactly as stored, which is consistent with how we handle all other
references between objects.
This diff is noisier than I'd like because of how much it takes to wire
a new argument (the raw variable values) through to the plan graph builder,
but those changes are pretty mechanical and the interesting logic lives
inside the plan graph builder itself, in NodeRootVariable, and
the shared helper functions in eval_variable.go.
While here I also took the opportunity to fix a historical API wart in
EvalContext, where SetModuleCallArguments was built to take a set of
variable values all at once but our current caller always calls with only
one at a time. That is now just SetModuleCallArgument singular, to match
with the new SetRootModuleArgument to deal with root module variables.
Previously our graph walker expected to recieve a data structure
containing schemas for all of the provider and provisioner plugins used in
the configuration and state. That made sense back when
terraform.NewContext was responsible for loading all of the schemas before
taking any other action, but it no longer has that responsiblity.
Instead, we'll now make sure that the "contextPlugins" object reaches all
of the locations where we need schema -- many of which already had access
to that object anyway -- and then load the needed schemas just in time.
The contextPlugins object memoizes schema lookups, so we can safely call
it many times with the same provider address or provisioner type name and
know that it'll still only load each distinct plugin once per Context
object.
As of this commit, the Context.Schemas method is now a public interface
only and not used by logic in the "terraform" package at all. However,
that does leave us in a rather tenuous situation of relying on the fact
that all practical users of terraform.Context end up calling "Schemas" at
some point in order to verify that we have all of the expected versions
of plugins. That's a non-obvious implicit dependency, and so in subsequent
commits we'll gradually move all responsibility for verifying plugin
versions into the caller of terraform.NewContext, which'll heal a
long-standing architectural wart whereby the caller is responsible for
installing and locating the plugin executables but not for verifying that
what's installed is conforming to the current configuration and dependency
lock file.
Previously the graph builders all expected to be given a full manifest
of all of the plugin component schemas that they could need during their
analysis work. That made sense when terraform.NewContext would always
proactively load all of the schemas before doing any other work, but we
now have a load-as-needed strategy for schemas.
We'll now have the graph builders use the contextPlugins object they each
already hold to retrieve individual schemas when needed. This avoids the
need to prepare a redundant data structure to pass alongside the
contextPlugins object, and leans on the memoization behavior inside
contextPlugins to preserve the old behavior of loading each provider's
schema only once.
In the v0.12 timeframe we made contextComponentFactory an interface with
the expectation that we'd write mocks of it for tests, but in practice we
ended up just always using the same "basicComponentFactory" implementation
throughout.
In the interests of simplification then, here we replace that interface
and its sole implementation with a new concrete struct type
contextPlugins.
Along with the general benefit that this removes an unneeded indirection,
this also means that we can add additional methods to the struct type
without the usual restriction that interface types prefer to be small.
In particular, in a future commit I'm planning to add methods for loading
provider and provisioner schemas, working with the currently-unused new
fields this commit has included in contextPlugins, as compared to its
predecessor basicComponentFactory.
Previously terraform.Context was built in an unfortunate way where all of
the data was provided up front in terraform.NewContext and then mutated
directly by subsequent operations. That made the data flow hard to follow,
commonly leading to bugs, and also meant that we were forced to take
various actions too early in terraform.NewContext, rather than waiting
until a more appropriate time during an operation.
This (enormous) commit changes terraform.Context so that its fields are
broadly just unchanging data about the execution context (current
workspace name, available plugins, etc) whereas the main data Terraform
works with arrives via individual method arguments and is returned in
return values.
Specifically, this means that terraform.Context no longer "has-a" config,
state, and "planned changes", instead holding on to those only temporarily
during an operation. The caller is responsible for propagating the outcome
of one step into the next step so that the data flow between operations is
actually visible.
However, since that's a change to the main entry points in the "terraform"
package, this commit also touches every file in the codebase which
interacted with those APIs. Most of the noise here is in updating tests
to take the same actions using the new API style, but this also affects
the main-code callers in the backends and in the command package.
My goal here was to refactor without changing observable behavior, but in
practice there are a couple externally-visible behavior variations here
that seemed okay in service of the broader goal:
- The "terraform graph" command is no longer hooked directly into the
core graph builders, because that's no longer part of the public API.
However, I did include a couple new Context functions whose contract
is to produce a UI-oriented graph, and _for now_ those continue to
return the physical graph we use for those operations. There's no
exported API for generating the "validate" and "eval" graphs, because
neither is particularly interesting in its own right, and so
"terraform graph" no longer supports those graph types.
- terraform.NewContext no longer has the responsibility for collecting
all of the provider schemas up front. Instead, we wait until we need
them. However, that means that some of our error messages now have a
slightly different shape due to unwinding through a differently-shaped
call stack. As of this commit we also end up reloading the schemas
multiple times in some cases, which is functionally acceptable but
likely represents a performance regression. I intend to rework this to
use caching, but I'm saving that for a later commit because this one is
big enough already.
The proximal reason for this change is to resolve the chicken/egg problem
whereby there was previously no single point where we could apply "moved"
statements to the previous run state before creating a plan. With this
change in place, we can now do that as part of Context.Plan, prior to
forking the input state into the three separate state artifacts we use
during planning.
However, this is at least the third project in a row where the previous
API design led to piling more functionality into terraform.NewContext and
then working around the incorrect order of operations that produces, so
I intend that by paying the cost/risk of this large diff now we can in
turn reduce the cost/risk of future projects that relate to our main
workflow actions.
Here we wire through the "move results" into the graph walk data
structures so that all of the the nodes which produce
plans.ResourceInstanceChange values can capture the "PrevRunAddr" for
each resource instance.
This doesn't actually quite work yet, because the logic in Context.Plan
isn't actually correct and so the updated state from
refactoring.ApplyMoves isn't actually visible as the "previous run state".
For that reason, the context test in this commit is currently skipped,
with the intent of re-enabling it once the updated state is properly
propagating into the plan graph walk and thus we can actually react to
the result of the move while choosing actions for those addresses.
This is part of a general effort to move all of Terraform's non-library
package surface under internal in order to reinforce that these are for
internal use within Terraform only.
If you were previously importing packages under this prefix into an
external codebase, you could pin to an earlier release tag as an interim
solution until you've make a plan to achieve the same functionality some
other way.
Martin Atkins