We have a few special use-cases in Terraform where an object is
constructed from a mixture of different sources, such as a configuration
file, command line arguments, and environment variables.
To represent this within the HCL model, we introduce a new "synthetic"
HCL body type that just represents a map of values that are interpreted
as attributes.
We then export the previously-private MergeBodies function to allow the
synthetic body to be used as an override for a "real" body, which then
allows us to combine these various sources together while still retaining
the proper source location information for each individual attribute.
Since a synthetic body doesn't actually exist in configuration, it does
not produce source locations that can be turned into source snippets but
we can still use placeholder strings to help the user to understand
which of the many different sources a particular value came from.
We will need access to this information in order to render interactive
input prompts, and it will also be useful in returning schema information
to external tools such as text editors that have autocomplete-like
functionality.
The remote API this talks to will be going away very soon, before our next
major release, and so we'll remove the command altogether in that release.
This also removes the "encodeHCL" function, which was used only for
adding a .tfvars-formatted file to the uploaded archive.
Absent values are omitted by the old code we are emulating in HCL, so we
must do the same here in order to avoid breaking assumptions in the
helper/schema layer.
While diagnostics are primarily designed for reporting problems in
configuration, they can also be used for errors and warnings about the
environment Terraform is running in, such as inability to reach a remote
service, etc.
Function Sourceless makes it easy to produce such diagnostics with the
customary summary/detail structure. When these diagnostics are rendered
they will have no source code snippet and will instead just include the
English-language content.
cty doesn't have a native string representation of a cty.Path because it
is the layer below any particular syntax, but up here in Terraform land
we know that we use HCL native syntax and so we can format a string in
a HCL-ish way for familiarity to the user.
We'll use this form automatically when such an error is used directly as a
diagnostic, but we also expose the function publicly so that other code
that incorporates errors into diagnostic detail strings can apply the
same formatting.
The usual usage of diagnostics requires us to pass around source location
information to everywhere that might generate a diagnostic, and that is
always the best way to get the most precise diagnostic source locations.
However, it's impractical to require source location information to be
retained in every Terraform subsystem, and so this new idea of "contextual
diagnostics" allows us to separate the generation of a diagnostic from
the resolution of its source location, instead resolving the location
information as a post-processing step once the call stack unwinds to a
place where there is enough context to find it.
This is necessarily a less precise approach than reading the source ranges
directly from the configuration AST, but gives us an alternative to no
diagnostics at all in portions of Terraform where full location
information is not available.
This is a best-effort sort of thing which will get as precise as it can
but may return a range in a parent block if the precise location of a
particular attribute cannot be found. Diagnostics that rely on this
mechanism should include some other contextual information in the detail
message to make up for any loss of precision that results.
In the long run we'd like to offer machine-readable output for more
commands, but for now we'll just start with a tactical feature in
"terraform validate" since this is useful for automated testing scenarios,
editor integrations, etc, and doesn't include any representations of types
that are expected to have breaking changes in the near future.
As part of some light reorganization of our commands, this new
implementation no longer does validation of variables and will thus avoid
the need to spin up a fully-valid context. Instead, its focus is on
validating the configuration itself, regardless of any variables, state,
etc.
This change anticipates us later adding a -validate-only flag to
"terraform plan" which will then take over the related use-case of
checking if a particular execution of Terraform is valid, _including_ the
state, variables, etc.
Although leaving variables out of validate feels pretty arbitrary today
while all of the variable sources are local anyway, we have plans to
allow per-workspace variables to be stored in the backend in future and
at that point it will no longer be possible to fully validate variables
without accessing the backend. The "terraform plan" command explicitly
requires access to the backend, while "terraform validate" is now
explicitly for local-only validation of a single module.
In a future commit this will be extended to do basic type checking of
the configuration based on provider schemas, etc.
We need to share a single config loader across all callers because that
allows us to maintain the source code cache we'll use for snippets in
error messages.
Nothing calls this yet. Callers will be gradually updated away from Module
and Config in subsequent commits.
If we get a diagnostic message that references a source range, and if the
source code for the referenced file is available, we'll show a snippet of
the source code with the source range highlighted.
At the moment we have no cache of source code, so in practice this
codepath can never be visited. Callers to format.Diagnostic will be
gradually updated in subsequent commits.
Martin Atkins