In the original incarnation of Meta.providerFactories we were returning
into a Meta.contextOpts whose signature didn't allow it to return an
error directly, and so we had compromised by making the provider factory
functions themselves return errors once called.
Subsequent work made Meta.contextOpts need to return an error anyway, but
at the time we neglected to update our handling of the providerFactories
result, having it still defer the error handling until we finally
instantiate a provider.
Although that did ultimately get the expected result anyway, the error
ended up being reported from deep in the guts of a Terraform Core graph
walk, in whichever concurrently-visited graph node happened to try to
instantiate the plugin first. This meant that the exact phrasing of the
error message would vary between runs and the reporting codepath didn't
have enough context to given an actionable suggestion on how to proceed.
In this commit we make Meta.contextOpts pass through directly any error
that Meta.providerFactories produces, and then make Meta.providerFactories
produce a special error type so that Meta.Backend can ultimately return
a user-friendly diagnostic message containing a specific suggestion to
run "terraform init", along with a short explanation of what a provider
plugin is.
The reliance here on an implied contract between two functions that are
not directly connected in the callstack is non-ideal, and so hopefully
we'll revisit this further in future work on the overall architecture of
the CLI layer. To try to make this robust in the meantime though, I wrote
it to use the errors.As function to potentially unwrap a wrapped version
of our special error type, in case one of the intervening layers is
changed at some point to wrap the downstream error before returning it.
Historically the responsibility for making sure that all of the available
providers are of suitable versions and match the appropriate checksums has
been split rather inexplicably over multiple different layers, with some
of the checks happening as late as creating a terraform.Context.
We're gradually iterating towards making that all be handled in one place,
but in this step we're just cleaning up some old remnants from the
main "terraform" package, which is now no longer responsible for any
version or checksum verification and instead just assumes it's been
provided with suitable factory functions by its caller.
We do still have a pre-check here to make sure that we at least have a
factory function for each plugin the configuration seems to depend on,
because if we don't do that up front then it ends up getting caught
instead deep inside the Terraform runtime, often inside a concurrent
graph walk and thus it's not deterministic which codepath will happen to
catch it on a particular run.
As of this commit, this actually does leave some holes in our checks: the
command package is using the dependency lock file to make sure we have
exactly the provider packages we expect (exact versions and checksums),
which is the most crucial part, but we don't yet have any spot where
we make sure that the lock file is consistent with the current
configuration, and we are no longer preserving the provider checksums as
part of a saved plan.
Both of those will come in subsequent commits. While it's unusual to have
a series of commits that briefly subtracts functionality and then adds
back in equivalent functionality later, the lock file checking is the only
part that's crucial for security reasons, with everything else mainly just
being to give better feedback when folks seem to be using Terraform
incorrectly. The other bits are therefore mostly cosmetic and okay to be
absent briefly as we work towards a better design that is clearer about
where that responsibility belongs.
Thus far our various interactions with the bits of state we keep
associated with a working directory have all been implemented directly
inside the "command" package -- often in the huge command.Meta type -- and
not managed collectively via a single component.
There's too many little codepaths reading and writing from the working
directory and data directory to refactor it all in one step, but this is
an attempt at a first step towards a future where everything that reads
and writes from the current working directory would do so via an object
that encapsulates the implementation details and offers a high-level API
to read and write all of these session-persistent settings.
The design here continues our gradual path towards using a dependency
injection style where "package main" is solely responsible for directly
interacting with the OS command line, the OS environment, the OS working
directory, the stdio streams, and the CLI configuration, and then
communicating the resulting information to the rest of Terraform by wiring
together objects. It seems likely that eventually we'll have enough wiring
code in package main to justify a more explicit organization of that code,
but for this commit the new "workdir.Dir" object is just wired directly in
place of its predecessors, without any significant change of code
organization at that top layer.
This first commit focuses on the main files and directories we use to
find provider plugins, because a subsequent commit will lightly reorganize
the separation of concerns for plugin launching with a similar goal of
collecting all of the relevant logic together into one spot.
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.
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.
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.
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