Previously we just ported over the simple "string", "list", and "map" type
hint keywords from the old loader, which exist primarily as hints to the
CLI for whether to treat -var=... arguments and environment variables as
literal strings or as HCL expressions.
However, we've been requested before to allow more specific constraints
here because it's generally better UX for a type error to be detected
within an expression in a calling "module" block rather than at some point
deep inside a third-party module.
To allow for more specific constraints, here we use the type constraint
expression syntax defined as an extension within HCL, which uses the
variable and function call syntaxes to represent types rather than values,
like this:
- string
- number
- bool
- list(string)
- list(any)
- list(map(string))
- object({id=string,name=string})
In native HCL syntax this looks like:
variable "foo" {
type = map(string)
}
In JSON, this looks like:
{
"variable": {
"foo": {
"type": "map(string)"
}
}
}
The selection of literal processing or HCL parsing of CLI-set values is
now explicit in the model and separate from the type, though it's still
derived from the type constraint and thus not directly controllable in
configuration.
Since this syntax is more complex than the keywords that replaced it, for
now the simpler keywords are still supported and "list" and "map" are
interpreted as list(any) and map(any) respectively, mimicking how they
were interpreted by Terraform 0.11 and earlier. For the time being our
documentation should continue to recommend these shorthand versions until
we gain more experience with the more-specific type constraints; most
users should just make use of the additional primitive type constraints
this enables: bool and number.
As a result of these more-complete type constraints, we can now type-check
the default value at config load time, which has the nice side-effect of
allowing us to produce a tailored error message if an override file
produces an invalid situation; previously the result was rather confusing
because the error message referred to the original definition of the
variable and not the overridden parts.
mergeBody is a hcl.Body implementation that deals with our override file
merging behavior for the portions of the configuration that are not
processed until full eval time.
Mimicking the behavior of our old config merge implementation from the
"config" package, the rules here are:
- Attributes in the override body hide attributes of the same name in
the base body.
- Any block in the override body hides all blocks with the same type name
that appear in the base body.
This is tested by a new test for the overriding of module arguments, which
asserts the correct behavior of the merged body as part of its work.
Some of the fields in our config structs are either mandatory in primary
files or there is a default value that we apply if absent.
Unfortunately override files impose the additional constraint that we
be allowed to omit required fields (which have presumably already been
set in the primary files) and that we are able to distinguish between a
default value and omitting a value entirely.
Since most of our fields were already acceptable for override files, here
we just add some new fields to deal with the few cases where special
handling is required and a helper function to disable the "Required" flag
on attributes in a given schema.
Martin Atkins