The resources, expressions, and modules pages were all split into smaller, more
navigable pages, but the old URLs had accumulated a large number of deep links
to their section headers. To help people recover when they click an old link, we
converted those old URLs to landing pages, which preserve all of the old in-page
anchors and point readers to the appropriate new destinations.
However, because the new link-to-new-page sections are so small, it was kind of
hard to tell which section you had clicked into! Especially if you were near the
bottom of the page and the browser wasn't able to position the desired section
at the very top of the window.
This commit aims to improve that by putting one full screen of whitespace in
between every linkable section on these landing pages. Yes, it's a hack, but
you're meant to only view these pages for three seconds or so before moving on
to the place you wanted to be, and this should help dispel any confusion about
which place that is.
This one is a lot like the previous two commits, but slightly more complex:
- Only adding one new meta-argument page, for `providers`; otherwise, it just
re-uses the dual-purpose pages I made in the resources commit.
- About that `providers` argument: The stuff that was relevant to consumers of a
module went in that meta-argument page, but there was also a huge deep dive on
how the _author_ of a re-usable module should handle provider configurations
in cases where inheriting the default providers isn't sufficient. THAT, I
moved into a new page in the module development section. (For the consumer of
a module, this should all be an implementation detail; the module README
should tell you which aliased providers you need to configure and pass, and
then you just do it, without worrying about proxy configuration blocks etc.)
- The "standard module structure" recommendations in the main module development
page gets a page of its own, to make it more prominent and discoverable.
- Same deal with using the old URL as a landing page, at least for the main
module calls page. It didn't seem necessary for the module development page.
As of this commit, that layout doesn't exist yet, but I'm isolating the one-line
changes to their own commit to try and keep your eyes from glazing over.
* website: Update all Learn crosslinks
The URL structure on Learn recently changed, so it's time to update some URLs.
Co-authored-by: Tu Nguyen <im2nguyen@users.noreply.github.com>
* 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>
As part of documenting the new module for_each capabilities we added a
section noting that shared modules using the legacy pattern of declaring
their own provider configurations would not be compatible with them.
However, that also applies to the new module depends_on and several folks
participating in the beta pointed out that the documentation wasn't
discussing that at all.
In order to generalize the advice, I've moved the old content we had
(since v0.11) recommending against provider configurations in shared
modules out into its own section, now being more explicit that it is
a legacy pattern and not recommended, and then folded the content about
for_each and count, now also including depends_on, into that expanded
section.
As is often the case, that had some knock-on effects on the content on
the rest of this page, so there's some general editing and reorganization
here. In particular, I moved the "Multiple Instances of a Module" section
much further up the page because it's content relevant to users of
shared modules, while the later content on this page is more aimed at
authors of shared modules, including the new section about the legacy
pattern.
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.
The Terraform Enterprise brand has now been split into two parts:
- Terraform Cloud is the application that helps teams use Terraform together,
with remote state storage, a shared run environment, etc.
- Terraform Enterprise is the on-premise distribution that lets enterprises run
a private instance of the Terraform Cloud application.
The former TFE docs have been split accordingly.
As part of this, I'm copying the entire text of the 0.12
docs/configuration/modules.html page into docs/configuration-0-11/modules.html —
some of the 0.11 pages needed to be able to link to the moved content, I
didn't want to jump versions jarringly, and a close reading didn't reveal
anything in there that's inaccurate for 0.11.
As well as some general consolidation and reorganizing, this also includes
some updated advice for making the best use of new Terraform v0.12
features to create infrastructure building-blocks.
In particular, the "Module Usage" documentation is now consolidated into
the configuration section in order to bring all of our general language
documentation together, and the top-level "Modules" section is now
primarily focused on module _authors_ as an audience, covering topics such
as publishing modules and designing them for reuse.
This commit is a wide-ranging set of edits to the pages under
/docs/configuration. Among other things, it
- Separates style conventions out into their own page.
- Separates type constraints and conversion info into their own page.
- Conflates similar complex types a little more freely, since the distinction is
only relevant when restricting inputs for a reusable module or resource.
- Clarifies several concepts that confused me during edits.
This adopts a more guide-like writing style, similar to what prior commits
have done to some other subsections of this section.
Since we already have a whole top-level section devoted to modules, there
is no need for full coverage of all of their features here. Instead, this
section focuses on an an initial introduction to what modules are and
the basics of their usage within the Terraform language. We then link
to the main modules section for the full details.
The modules mechanism has changed quite a bit for version 0.11 and so
although simple usage remains broadly compatible there are some
significant changes in the behavior of more complex modules.
Since large parts of this were rewritten anyway, I also took the
opportunity to do some copy-editing to make the prose on this page more
consistent with our usual editorial voice and to wrap the long
lines.
Nick Fagerlund