The existing "type" argument allows specifying a type constraint that
allows for some basic validation, but often there are more constraints on
a variable value than just its type.
This new feature (requiring an experiment opt-in for now, while we refine
it) allows specifying arbitrary validation rules for any variable which
can then cause custom error messages to be returned when a caller provides
an inappropriate value.
variable "example" {
validation {
condition = var.example != "nope"
error_message = "Example value must not be \"nope\"."
}
}
The core parts of this are designed to do as little new work as possible
when no validations are specified, and thus the main new checking codepath
here can therefore only run when the experiment is enabled in order to
permit having validations.
Following on from de652e22a26b, this introduces deprecation warnings for
when an attribute value expression is a template with only a single
interpolation sequence, and for variable type constraints given in quotes.
As with the previous commit, we allowed these deprecated forms with no
warning for a few releases after v0.12.0 to ensure that folks who need to
write cross-compatible modules for a while during upgrading would be able
to do so, but we're now marking these as explicitly deprecated to guide
users towards the new idiomatic forms.
The "terraform 0.12upgrade" tool would've already updated configurations
to not hit these warnings for those who had pre-existing configurations
written for Terraform 0.11.
The main target audience for these warnings are newcomers to Terraform who
are learning from existing examples already published in various spots on
the wider internet that may be showing older Terraform syntax, since those
folks will not be running their configurations through the upgrade tool.
These warnings will hopefully guide them towards modern Terraform usage
during their initial experimentation, and thus reduce the chances of
inadvertently adopting the less-readable legacy usage patterns in
greenfield projects.
During the 0.12 work we intended to move all of the variable value
collection logic into the UI layer (command package and backend packages)
and present them all together as a unified data structure to Terraform
Core. However, we didn't quite succeed because the interactive prompts
for unset required variables were still being handled _after_ calling
into Terraform Core.
Here we complete that earlier work by moving the interactive prompts for
variables out into the UI layer too, thus allowing us to handle final
validation of the variables all together in one place and do so in the UI
layer where we have the most context still available about where all of
these values are coming from.
This allows us to fix a problem where previously disabling input with
-input=false on the command line could cause Terraform Core to receive an
incomplete set of variable values, and fail with a bad error message.
As a consequence of this refactoring, the scope of terraform.Context.Input
is now reduced to only gathering provider configuration arguments. Ideally
that too would move into the UI layer somehow in a future commit, but
that's a problem for another day.
Previously we were using the experimental HCL 2 repository, but now we'll
shift over to the v2 import path within the main HCL repository as part of
actually releasing HCL 2.0 as stable.
This is a mechanical search/replace to the new import paths. It also
switches to the v2.0.0 release of HCL, which includes some new code that
Terraform didn't previously have but should not change any behavior that
matters for Terraform's purposes.
For the moment the experimental HCL2 repository is still an indirect
dependency via terraform-config-inspect, so it remains in our go.sum and
vendor directories for the moment. Because terraform-config-inspect uses
a much smaller subset of the HCL2 functionality, this does still manage
to prune the vendor directory a little. A subsequent release of
terraform-config-inspect should allow us to completely remove that old
repository in a future commit.
We want the forthcoming v0.12.0 release to be the last significant
breaking change to our main configuration constructs for a long time, but
not everything could be implemented in that release.
As a compromise then, we reserve various names we have some intent of
using in a future release so that such future uses will not be a further
breaking change later.
Some of these names are associated with specific short-term plans, while
others are reserved conservatively for possible later work and may be
"un-reserved" in a later release if we don't end up using them. The ones
that we expect to use in the near future were already being handled, so
we'll continue to decode them at the config layer but also produce an
error so that we don't get weird behavior downstream where the
corresponding features don't work yet.
Our new "addrs" package gives us some nice representations of various
kinds of "address" within Terraform. To talk to APIs that use these, it's
convenient to be able to easily derive such addresses from the
configuration objects.
These new methods, along with a recasting of the existing
Resource.ProviderConfigKey method to Resource.ProviderConfigAddr, give us
some key integration points to support the configuration graph transforms
in the main "terraform" package.
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.
In our new loader we are changing certain values in configuration to be
naked keywords or references rather than quoted strings as before. Since
many of these have been shown in books, tutorials, and our own
documentation we will make the old forms generate deprecation warnings
rather than errors so that newcomers starting from older documentation
can be eased into the new syntax, rather than getting blocked.
This will also avoid creating a hard compatibility wall for reusable
modules that are already published, allowing them to still be used in
spite of these warnings and then fixed when the maintainer is able.
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.
This is a first pass of decoding of the main Terraform configuration file
format. It hasn't yet been tested with any real-world configurations, so
it will need to be revised further as we test it more thoroughly.
These types represent the individual elements within configuration, the
modules a configuration is made of, and the configuration (static module
tree) itself.
Martin Atkins