When helping folks in the community forum, I commonly see questions around
more complex patterns in transforming deep data structures into different
shapes to work with for_each. We have examples of these patterns in the
docs for the functions that they rely on, but they were not previously
very discoverable in the main configuration language documentation
sections.
Here I've moved the "Using Expressions in for_each" subsection on the
Resources page above some of the other sub-sections to hopefully make it
easier to see, and written out in more detail the two specific patterns
that answer a significant number of for_each-related user questions in
the hope that readers will be more likely to realize that the links are
relevant to what their goals.
I also added some more elaboration about the behavior of converting from
list to set in the "Using Sets" subsection, because this feature is often
a user's first encounter with the set data type and I've inferred from
some of the questions I've answered that a number of Terraform users don't
have prior experience with set data types in other languages to draw
assumptions from.
Finally, I added some similar links to the for_each patterns within the
for expression documentation itself, to try to make those examples more
visible to those who might be discovering the documentation in a different
sequence, e.g. by following a deep link shared in an answer to a question
in the community forum.
A very common question since we launched the two repetition constructs
is how to deal with situations where the input data structure doesn't
match one-to-one with the desired configuration.
This adds some full worked examples of two common situations that have
come up in questions. To avoid adding a lot of extra content to the
already-large "expressions" and "resources" pages, the main bulk of this
new content lives with the relevant functions themselves as a full example
of one thing they are good for, and then we'll link to them from the two
general documentation sections where folks are likely to be reading when
they encounter the problem.
- Make these descriptions more similar, since they do basically the same thing.
- Add some subheaders to break up the wall of text and make it more skimmable.
- Nudge people more firmly toward `for_each` if they need to actually
incorporate data from a variable into their instances.
- Add version note so you know whether you can use this yet.
This also includes a previously-missing test that verifies the behavior
described here, implemented as a planning context test for consistency
with how the other ignore_changes tests are handled.
For 0.11 I just specified the naming rules; for 0.12, I added some info about
referencing values and tightened up the layout of the optional arguments.
This commit also syncs up descriptions of `depends_on`.
* docs: update plan command documentation. Fixes#19235
* docs: added a missing reserved variable name. Fixes#19159.
* website: add note that resource names cannot start with a number
* website: add some notes to the 0.12 upgrade guide
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.
In the process of writing this, I identified some unclear statements in
the "Resources" subsection, and so these are also revised here for
consistency with the output values documentation.
This is now the leading subsection of the Configuration section of the
docs, and so this rewrite intends to make it more "guide-like" and as
accessible as possible to those who are not yet familiar with other
Terraform concepts.
This rewrite also attempts to introduce some consistency into our
vocabulary, which should eventually be reflected throughout our
documentation. In particular:
- "Resource" refers to the block the user writes in configuration, while
"Resource _Type_" refers to what the provider defines. We previously
used "resource" for both of these interchangeably.
- "Resource" is no longer used to refer to what gets created and managed
in remote APIs as a result of a resource block in configuration. Lacking
a good distinct name for these, this guide uses the word "object",
qualifying it as "infrastructure object" or "remote object" where
necessary to retain clarity. This distinction is important to enable
a clear description of resource lifecycle.
- "Argument" refers to an element (attribute or block) within a resource
block. This terminology was already being used in some places, so we
embrace it here as a way to distinguish from "attribute", which is
what a resource _exports_ for use in expressions.
- Since interpolation is no longer needed to use expressions in the
language, the word "expression" is used to describe the definition of
a value that might involve some computation. Where necessary, this is
used with a modifier "arbitrary expression" to contrast with situations
where the set of allowed expression constructs is constrained.
Create-before-destroy dependencies are automatically ordered correctly
by terraform. Remove the old notice about requiring all dependencies to
have the same setting for create_before_destroy.
Martin Atkins