This is an initial partial description of the plugin protocol focused
mainly on explaining the purpose of the .proto files. In subsequent
updates we will also document the negotiation protocol, etc.
For this first pass the goal was just to publish some information that was
already available in an internal design document so that it's visible to
SDK implementers. It is focused on the .proto versioning strategy because
that was the main topic of the internal design documentation this was
based on.
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.
This doc was originally written in the middle of Terraform v0.12
development while some refactoring was already in progress. Here we update
those parts to refer to where the relevant functionality finally landed,
and also update some things that we did not anticipate changing at the
time but ended up having to be changed during the v0.12 development
anyway.
For a while now we've been gathering some codebase-level docs that felt
out-of-place on the main Terraform website (since they are about the
implementation, not usage) but we had no existing suitable place to put
them.
In order to make this information more available (and, hopefully, more
likely to stay up-to-date as we change things), here we'll establish the
"docs" directory as a place to keep documentation aimed at those who are
working on code changes to the Terraform Core codebase.
User-oriented docs should never appear in this directory. The Terraform
website is always the better place for those. The set of docs here is
rudimentary to start and we'll see if it makes sense to expand and
reorganize it over time based on the experience with having these initial
docs available.
Martin Atkins