The HashiCorp engineering services team has set up APT and Yum
repositories as alternative installation methods for various HashiCorp
products, now including Terraform.
We don't really have a great place to talk about these in our current
website structure. There is a longer-term plan to revamp the downloads
page to include other options, but we are already getting lots of
questions about how to use these repositories and so my goal here is to
publish at least a first pass of documentation, linked from the Downloads
page sidebar as a placeholder for now, so we'll have somewhere to refer to
when answering such questions.
My intent is that even once we have a revamped Downloads page that
mentions these options more clearly, we'll still need to link out to
another page to talk about various details, and so the two new URLs this
creates would be the home of that content, even if we rewrite the specific
prose here to work better in the context of the new Downloads page.
The example configuration now uses Terraform 0.12+ syntax, and the
output examples are up to date with the current text UI. We also add an
explicit recommendation to use the `-json` option for a consistent and
stable output format, for use in automation.
Prior to Terraform 0.12 these two functions were the only way to construct
literal lists and maps (respectively) in HIL expressions. Terraform 0.12,
by switching to HCL 2, introduced first-class syntax for constructing
tuple and object values, which can then be converted into list and map
values using the tolist and tomap type conversion functions.
We marked both of these functions as deprecated in the Terraform v0.12
release and have since then mentioned in the docs that they will be
removed in a future Terraform version. The "terraform 0.12upgrade" tool
from Terraform v0.12 also included a rule to automatically rewrite uses
of these functions into equivalent new syntax.
The main motivation for removing these now is just to get this change made
prior to Terraform 1.0. as we'll be doing with various other deprecations.
However, a specific reason for these two functions in particular is that
their existence is what caused us to invent the idea of a "type expression"
as a distinct kind of expression in Terraform v0.12, and so removing them
now would allow potentially unifying type expressions with value
expressions in a future release.
We do not have any current specific plans to make that change, but one
potential motivation for doing so would be to take another attempt at a
generalized "convert" function which takes a type as one of its arguments.
Our previous attempt to implement such a function was foiled by the fact
that Terraform's expression validator doesn't have any way to know to
treat one argument of a particular function as special, and so it was
generating incorrect error messages. We won't necessarily do that, but
having these "list" and "map" functions out of the way leaves the option
open.
The documentation states that an explicit type conversion to set is needed, but it does not say why implicit type conversion does not work.
Co-authored-by: Nick Fagerlund <nick@hashicorp.com>
* The index must be non-negative integer
and added instructions on how to get the last value in the list.
* Typo fix
Co-authored-by: Nick Fagerlund <nick@hashicorp.com>
* Update module-registry-protocol.html.md
1: There is a mismatch in the segment labels for the version query URL (system vs provider)
2: There is a discrepancy between the documentation and the actual generated request for retrieving module source code (URL segments 4 vs 3)
- There is no segment for "provider"
* Update module-registry-protocol.html.md
Changed ```:system``` to ```:provider``` for versions and source API URLs
These pages are thoroughly obsolete. Later, we'll delete and redirect them; for
now, we'll make sure the relevant pages are front-and-center in the sidebar if
someone somehow ends up on here.
Several `terraform` subcommands include sub-sub-commands; with our old sidebar
system, viewing those took you to an isolated "island" nav sidebar, away from
the main docs. The new navigation will adopt all these pages, so we don't need
to exile the reader to odd places.
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.
We typically try to avoid making subjective, boasty claims in our
documentation in recent times, but there remained both some older
documentation that we've not recently revised and also some newer examples
that are, in retrospect, also perhaps more "boasty" than they need to be.
We prefer not to use this sort of boasty language because not everyone
using Terraform has the same background and experience, and so what is
"easy" or "intuitive" to one person may not be so to another person, and
that should not suggest that the second person is in any way wrong or
inadequate.
In reviewing some of our use of the word "easy" here I tried as much as
possible to surgically revise the existing content without getting drawn
into a big rewrite, but in some cases the content was either pretty
unsalvageable (due to talking about obsolete features that were removed
long ago) or required some broader changes to make the result hopefully
still get the same facts across. In those cases I've both removed some
content entirely or adjusted larger paragraphs.
This was not an exhaustive review and so I'm sure there's still plenty of
room for similar improvements elsewhere. I also resisted the urge to
update some pages that contain outdated information about currently-active
features.
My initial motivation here was to update the example output from
Terraform's top-level help list to match recent updates in the layout
and language used.
However, while here I took the opportunity to update some dated language
that was not consistent with our modern documentation writing style,
in particular including a totally unnecessary and potentially-alienating
claim that Terraform is "very easy to use". Our modern writing style
discourages this sort of "boastful" language and encourages us to focus on
the facts at hand.
This is an analog to the "alltrue" function, using OR as the reduce
operator rather than AND.
This also includes some simplification of the "alltrue" implementation
to implement it similarly as a sort of reduce operation with AND
as the reduce operator, but with the same effective behavior.
* Fixes#26684
* Update provider-requirements.html.md
Removing additional/extra newlines
* Update provider-requirements.html.md
And now some trailing spaces. le sigh
* Update config.html.md
When reading this page, I couldn't find the list of the "supported backends to the left". They're actually on a different page, so thought I'd update it so that others wouldn't find it confusing like me.
If this is ok with you, would it be possible to label this PR with 'hacktoberfest-accepted'? I'm still new to this. If not, I'd be alright. Thank you!
* Update config.html.md
Swapped the full URL in the link for a relative path
Co-authored-by: Petros Kolyvas <petros@hashicorp.com>
* ADD CLI option position for force-unlock command
* Update force-unlock.html.markdown
Made a change to also include the missing [DIR]
Co-authored-by: Petros Kolyvas <petros@hashicorp.com>
These were initially introduced as functions with "encode" and "decode"
prefixes, but that doesn't match with our existing convention of putting
the encoding format first so that the encode and decode functions will
group together in a alphabetically-ordered function list.
"text" is not really a defined serialization format, but it's a short word
that hopefully represents well enough what these functions are aiming to
encode and decode, while being consistent with existing functions like
jsonencode/jsondecode, yamlencode/yamldecode, etc.
The "base64" at the end here is less convincing because there is precedent
for that modifier to appear both at the beginning and the end in our
existing function names. I chose to put it at the end here because that
seems to be our emergent convention for situations where the base64
encoding is a sort of secondary modifier alongside the primary purpose
of the function, as we see with "filebase64". (base64gzip is an exception
here, but it seems outvoted by the others.)
For normal provider installation we want to associate each provider with
a selected version number and find a suitable package for that version
that conforms to the official hashes for that release.
Those requirements are very onerous for a provider developer currently
testing a not-yet-released build, though. To allow for that case this new
CLI configuration feature allows overriding specific providers to refer
to give local filesystem directories.
Any provider overridden in this way is not subject to the usual
restrictions about selected versions or checksum conformance, and
activating an override won't cause any changes to the selections recorded
in the lock file because it's intended to be a temporary setting for one
developer only.
This is, in a sense, a spiritual successor of an old capability we had to
override specific plugins in the CLI configuration file. There were
some vestiges of that left in the main package and CLI config package
but nothing has actually been honoring them for several versions now and
so this commit removes them to avoid confusion with the new mechanism.
This builds on an experimental feature in the underlying cty library which
allows marking specific attribtues of an object type constraint as
optional, which in turn modifies how the cty conversion package handles
missing attributes in a source value: it will silently substitute a null
value of the appropriate type rather than returning an error.
In order to implement the experiment this commit temporarily forks the
HCL typeexpr extension package into a local internal/typeexpr package,
where I've extended the type constraint syntax to allow annotating object
type attributes as being optional using the HCL function call syntax.
If the experiment is successful -- both at the Terraform layer and in
the underlying cty library -- we'll likely send these modifications to
upstream HCL so that other HCL-based languages can potentially benefit
from this new capability.
Because it's experimental, the optional attribute modifier is allowed only
with an explicit opt-in to the module_variable_optional_attrs experiment.
This includes both the main documentation about the lock file itself and
changes to related documentation about Terraform commands that interact
with the lock file.
We will likely continue to update this first pass of documentation as we
get feedback and questions during the prerelease period.
* 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>
Move the information about state from the "caveats" to the main
info section, using similar information to sensitive outputs.
Updates the header of the section from similar inspiration.
We can remove the caveat about changing map elements.
Add a little more text about the intended use case for ignore_changes,
as the common case of fixing erroneous provider behavior should not be
the primary motivation for the maintenance of this feature.
* Put link to tutorial in its own section, call it a tutorial instead of guide, and use new canonical URL.
* Mention limitations of using import with a remote backed
* Typo fix
Co-authored-by: Nick Fagerlund <nick.fagerlund@gmail.com>
This commit adds an `alltrue` function to Terraform configuration. A
reason we might want this function is because it will enable more
powerful custom variable validations. For example:
```hcl
variable "amis" {
type = list(object({
id = string
}))
validation {
condition = (alltrue([
for a in var.amis : length(a.id) > 4 && substr(a.id, 0, 4) == "ami-"
]))
error_message = "The ID of at least one AMI was invalid."
}
}
```
For a credentials helper plugin to be useful with Terraform 0.13+, we
need to cope with the case of having no credentials for a host without
this being an error. This is to allow the public Terraform Registry to
be accessed without supplying a token.
The way to implement this is to respond to queries for credentials for a
host which has no credentials stored with an empty object and a success
exit code. This contradicts the previous documentation, which calls for
an error response in this case.
* Adding not about data-sources and depends-on for 0.12 users
* Bold
* A little more markdown
* A little more markdown for data_sources in 0.12
* Some iteration based on good feedback
In addition to the directories previously listed, Terraform looks in the
CLI config directory ($HOME/.terraform.d/plugins on macOS/Linux/UNIX,
and %APPDATA%/terraform.d/plugins on Windows). List this in the
documentation for clarity.
We also add a note about the working directory relative "vendor"
location, ./terraform.d/plugins.
The version argument is deprecated in Terraform v0.14 in favor of
required_providers and will be removed in a future version of terraform
(expected to be v0.15). The provider configuration documentation already
discourages use of 'version' inside provider configuration blocks, so it
only needed an extra note that it is actively deprecated.
This new option is intended to address the previous inconsistencies where
some older subcommands supported partially changing the target directory
(where Terraform would use the new directory inconsistently) where newer
commands did not support that override at all.
Instead, now Terraform will accept a -chdir command at the start of the
command line (before the subcommand) and will interpret it as a request
to direct all actions that would normally be taken in the current working
directory into the target directory instead. This is similar to options
offered by some other similar tools, such as the -C option in "make".
The new option is only accepted at the start of the command line (before
the subcommand) as a way to reflect that it is a global command (not
specific to a particular subcommand) and that it takes effect _before_
executing the subcommand. This also means it'll be forced to appear before
any other command-specific arguments that take file paths, which hopefully
communicates that those other arguments are interpreted relative to the
overridden path.
As a measure of pragmatism for existing uses, the path.cwd object in
the Terraform language will continue to return the _original_ working
directory (ignoring -chdir), in case that is important in some exceptional
workflows. The path.root object gives the root module directory, which
will always match the overriden working directory unless the user
simultaneously uses one of the legacy directory override arguments, which
is not a pattern we intend to support in the long run.
As a first step down the deprecation path, this commit adjusts the
documentation to de-emphasize the inconsistent old command line arguments,
including specific guidance on what to use instead for the main three
workflow commands, but all of those options remain supported in the same
way as they were before. In a later commit we'll make those arguments
produce a visible deprecation warning in Terraform's output, and then
in an even later commit we'll remove them entirely so that -chdir is the
single supported way to run Terraform from a directory other than the
one containing the root module configuration.
The subtle difference in keywords when creating vs. accessing locals trips
people up, even more than the "variable" vs. "var" distinction. It deserves its
own subheader on the page, plus a nice noisy callout.
I've just wasted an hour to two hours trying to find the problem to finally realize that although I declare a "locals" block, it's referred to as "local". This is pretty weird! So let's be be clear about this.
We previously had this just stubbed out because it was a stretch goal for
the v0.13.0 release and it ultimately didn't make it in.
Here we fill out the existing stub -- with a minor change to its interface
so it can access credentials -- with a client implementation that is
compatible with the directory structure produced by the
"terraform providers mirror" subcommand, were the result to be published
on a static file server.
- Edits to registry overview
- Add index link as 'overview' (header links are semi-invisible)
- move providers/overview.html to providers/index.html
- Edits to providers overview
- fix filename of os-arch
- edits to provider publishing
Terraform's design assumes that each remote object in Terraform's care is
bound to one resource instance and one alone. If the same object is bound
to multiple instances then confusing behavior will often result, such as
two resource configurations competing to update a single object, or
objects being "left behind" when all existing Terraform deployments are
destroyed.
This assumption was previously only implied, though. This change is an
attempt to be more explicit about it, although these are additions to some
older documentation sections that have not been revised for some time and
so this is just a best effort to make this information discoverable
without getting drawn into a full-on reorganization of these sections.
While revising this there were some particular oddities that I decided to
revise while I was there, but I'll leave a fuller revision of this older
content for a later commit when we have more time to review it in greater
detail.
* 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.
Martin Atkins