Terraform 0.15.3 added support for a `-json` flag to the plan, apply,
and refresh commands, which renders the Terraform UI output in a
structured machine readable format. This commit adds documentation for
this interface.
The set of paths which caused a resource update to require replacement
has been stored in the plan since 0.15.0 (#28201). This commit adds a
simple JSON representation of these paths, allowing consumers of this
format to determine exactly which paths caused the resource to be
replaced.
This representation is intentionally more loosely encoded than the JSON
state serialization of paths used for sensitive attributes. Instead of a
path step being represented by an object with type and value, we use a
more-JavaScripty heterogenous array of numbers and strings. Any
practical consumer of this format will likely traverse an object tree
using the index operator, which should work more easily with this
format. It also allows easy prefix comparison for consumers which are
tracking paths.
While updating the documentation to include this new field, I noticed
that some others were missing, so added them too.
Previously we were repeating some logic in the UI layer in order to
recover relevant additional context about a change to report to a user.
In order to help keep things consistent, and to have a clearer path for
adding more such things in the future, here we capture this user-facing
idea of an "action reason" within the plan model, and then use that
directly in order to decide how to describe the change to the user.
For the moment the "tainted" situation is the only one that gets a special
message, matching what we had before, but we can expand on this in future
in order to give better feedback about the other replace situations too.
This also preemptively includes the "replacing by request" reason, which
is currently not reachable but will be used in the near future as part of
implementing the -replace=... plan command line option to allow forcing
a particular object to be replaced.
So far we don't have any special reasons for anything other than replacing,
which makes sense because replacing is the only one that is in a sense
a special case of another action (Update), but this could expand to
other kinds of reasons in the future, such as explaining which of the
few different reasons a data source read might be deferred until the
apply step.
This is not currently a supported interface, but we plan to release
tool(s) that consume parts of it that are more dependable later,
separately from Terraform CLI itself.
These links largely still go somewhere useful, but they have some kind of issue
revealed by our new link checker:
- Some of them point to a stale URL that redirects, and can be updated to the
new destination.
- Some of them point to anchors that don't exist (anymore?) in the destination.
- Some of them end up redirecting unnecessarily due to how the server handles
directory URLs without trailing slashes. Sorry, I know that's pointless, just,
humor me for the time being so we can get our CI green. 😭
In a couple cases, I've added invisible anchors to destination pages, either to
preserve an old habit or because the current anchors kind of suck due to being
particularly long or meandering.
Some hasty, incorrect merge conflict fixing caused this page to have a
strange mix of terminology between "system" and "provider". Along with
that, there were also several editorial errors caused by text on this
page having originally been derived from the provider registry
documentation.
This documentation will now consistently talk about being a module
registry protocol rather than a provider registry protocol, and it will
consistently use the term "system" as a generic term for the final part
of the module source address, aside from noting that there is an optional
convention to name it after the "type" part of an official provider when
possible.
* Update module-registry-protocol.html.md
1: There is a mismatch in the segment labels for the version query URL (system vs provider)
2: There is a discrepancy between the documentation and the actual generated request for retrieving module source code (URL segments 4 vs 3)
- There is no segment for "provider"
* Update module-registry-protocol.html.md
Changed ```:system``` to ```:provider``` for versions and source API URLs
We typically try to avoid making subjective, boasty claims in our
documentation in recent times, but there remained both some older
documentation that we've not recently revised and also some newer examples
that are, in retrospect, also perhaps more "boasty" than they need to be.
We prefer not to use this sort of boasty language because not everyone
using Terraform has the same background and experience, and so what is
"easy" or "intuitive" to one person may not be so to another person, and
that should not suggest that the second person is in any way wrong or
inadequate.
In reviewing some of our use of the word "easy" here I tried as much as
possible to surgically revise the existing content without getting drawn
into a big rewrite, but in some cases the content was either pretty
unsalvageable (due to talking about obsolete features that were removed
long ago) or required some broader changes to make the result hopefully
still get the same facts across. In those cases I've both removed some
content entirely or adjusted larger paragraphs.
This was not an exhaustive review and so I'm sure there's still plenty of
room for similar improvements elsewhere. I also resisted the urge to
update some pages that contain outdated information about currently-active
features.
For a credentials helper plugin to be useful with Terraform 0.13+, we
need to cope with the case of having no credentials for a host without
this being an error. This is to allow the public Terraform Registry to
be accessed without supplying a token.
The way to implement this is to respond to queries for credentials for a
host which has no credentials stored with an empty object and a success
exit code. This contradicts the previous documentation, which calls for
an error response in this case.
We previously had this just stubbed out because it was a stretch goal for
the v0.13.0 release and it ultimately didn't make it in.
Here we fill out the existing stub -- with a minor change to its interface
so it can access credentials -- with a client implementation that is
compatible with the directory structure produced by the
"terraform providers mirror" subcommand, were the result to be published
on a static file server.
* Make sidebar nav in language docs more intuitive
* Minor display fixes for registry docs
* Explain providers in the registry in the providers index
* Revise a bunch of language docs around provider reqs
This is mostly an effort to smooth out some of the explanations, make sure
things are presented in a helpful order, make sure terminology lines up, draw
connections between related concepts, make default behavior more apparent, and
the like. It shouldn't include very much new information, but there might be one
or two things that came out of a conversation somewhere.
Co-authored-by: Judith Malnick <judith@hashicorp.com>
The "Configuration Language" section was becoming rather unweildy, both
by having a lot of pages and by some of the pages being quite large in
themselves.
This is a first step towards breaking things up a little more, starting
with two changes:
- The "Configuration Language" navigation is now split into two
sub-headings "Configuration Blocks" and "Syntax".
- Some of the information about sub-blocks of the "terraform" block are
now given their own pages, because their content is quite complex
in itself.
- "Version Constraints" is now a page in its own right, rather than this
content being duplicated in slightly different forms across multiple
contexts that make use of user-specified version constraints.
We previously had the module registry protocol documented only as an
undefined subset of the full API of the official registry implementation.
However, the vast majority of endpoints documented in the official API
docs are not needed for a headless third-party module registry that only
intends to make modules available to Terraform CLI.
To make this clearer to potential third-party implementors, and also for
consistency with how the provider registry protocol is now documented,
here we create a new page to describe the subset required for all
registries, and then explain in the docs for the offical API that
potential third-party implementors should refer to the new page instead.
The longer page describing the full API of the official implementations
remains for those who wish to write clients for that API, because it is
part of the API surface area for Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise.
I also took this opportunity to address the fact that module addresses
don't really contain "provider names" at all, but rather than the fourth
field in the address is _conventionally_ an official provider name but
can really be any string that serves to differentiate multiple
implementations of the same abstraction. The new docs therefore refer to
this field as "system" rather than "provider".
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>
We have released the v0.12-oriented content to the website early in order
to support the beta process, but in some places we neglected to explicitly
mark features or content as being v0.12-only.
Here we add explicit markers to the main cases we've seen where readers
have reported confusion, along with some other tweaks in similar vein.
Now includes more complete information on usage of private registries and
updates the module registry API documentation to include the new
version-enumeration endpoint along with describing Terraform's discovery
protocol.
Previously we just assumed the reader was familiar with the idea of a
graph but didn't explain it.
Since graphs are an implementation detail of Terraform, rather than
essential information needed for new users, this revises the introduction
text to talk only about _dependencies_, which we assume the user is
familiar with as a more practical concept.
Additionally, Paul Hinze did a great talk on how Terraform uses graphs
at HashiConf 2016 which is good additional content for our existing
"Graph Internals" page, which includes a concise explanation of the
basics of graph theory.
Alisdair McDiarmid