For some time now we've been recommending explicitly passing data between
configurations using separate resource types and data sources, rather than
always using terraform_remote_state, for reasons including reducing
coupling between subsystems and allowing a configuration's state snapshots
to be under restrictive access controls.
However, those recommendations have so far not appeared directly in the
documentation for terraform_remote_state, and have instead just been
alluded to elsewhere in the documentation when discussing ways to pass
data between configurations.
This change, then, is an attempt to be clear and explicit about the
recommendation and to give a variety of specific examples of how to
implement it. The terraform_remote_state data source page is admittedly
not the most obvious place in the information architecture to put a set
of alternatives to it, but it does appear that this documentation page is
where people most commonly end up when researching options in this area
and so I've put this here in an attempt to "meet people where they are".
Possibly in a future documentation reorganization we might have an
separate page specifically about sharing data between configurations, but
we don't currently have time to do that bigger reorganization. If we do so
later, the content on this page could potentially be replaced with a
summary of the recommendation and a link to another place for the details,
but the goal here is to make this information visible in the existing
location people look for it, rather than blocking until there's a better
place for it to live.
This also includes a small amount of editing of some existing content on
the page to use terminology and style more similar to how our main
configuration language documentation is written,.
Before configuring a provider, we need to unmark the configuration
object, in case it includes any sensitive values. This is required
because configuration occurs over gRPC, which doesn't support sensitive
marks.
Some hasty, incorrect merge conflict fixing caused this page to have a
strange mix of terminology between "system" and "provider". Along with
that, there were also several editorial errors caused by text on this
page having originally been derived from the provider registry
documentation.
This documentation will now consistently talk about being a module
registry protocol rather than a provider registry protocol, and it will
consistently use the term "system" as a generic term for the final part
of the module source address, aside from noting that there is an optional
convention to name it after the "type" part of an official provider when
possible.
This is a new part of the existing module_variable_optional_attrs
experiment, because it's intended to complement the ability to declare
an input variable whose type constraint is an object type with optional
attributes. Module authors can use this to replace null values (that were
either explicitly set or implied by attribute omission) with other
non-null values of the same type.
This function is a bit more type-fussy than our functions typically are
because it's intended for use primarily with input variables that have
fully-specified type constraints, and thus it uses that type information
to help inform how the defaults data structure should be interpreted.
Other uses of this function will probably be harder today because it takes
a lot of extra annotation to build a value of a specific type if it isn't
passing through a variable type constraint. Perhaps later language
features for more general type conversion will make this more applicable,
but for now the more general form of this problem is better solved other
ways.
So far all of our language experiments have been new constructs handled
statically up in the configs package, but functions are another common
extention point where experiments could be useful to gather feedback and
so this intends to pass the information down into the right place to allow
for that to happen, even though as of this commit there are no
experimental functions to use it.
The new nav structure demanded a few new pages that give context about a feature
or workflow. In a few cases, they take text from an existing page.
Co-authored-by: Tu Nguyen <im2nguyen@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Judith Malnick <judith.patudith@gmail.com>
We're splitting the current Terraform CLI docs into two top-level categories,
and these are the new nav sidebars for those sections.
As of this commit, they refer to some new "glue" pages that don't exist yet.
This is needed to make it possible to use the scram-sha-256
authentication method for the pg backend. It's not easy to write
unit-tests for this since it requires a specific configuration of the
PostgreSQL server, I did test it manually thought and everything seems
to work like it should.
Closes https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/24016
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.
When a resource has no `provider` argument specified, its provider is
derived from the implied provider type based on the resource type. For
example, a `boop_instance` resource has an implied provider local name
of `boop`. Correspondingly, its provider configuration is specified with
a `provider "boop"` block.
However, users can use the `required_providers` configuration to give a
different local name to a given provider than its defined type. For
example, a provider may be published at `foobar/beep`, but provide
resources such as `boop_instance`. The most convenient way to use this
provider is with a `required_providers` map:
terraform {
required_providers {
boop = {
source = "foobar/beep"
}
}
}
Once that local name is defined, it is used for provider configuration
(a `provider "boop"` block, not `provider "beep"`). It should also be
used when looking up a resource's provider configuration or provider.
This commit fixes a bug with this edge case, where previously we were
looking up the local provider configuration block using the resource's
assigned provider type. Instead, if no provider argument is specified,
we should be using the implied provider type, as that is what binds the
resource to the local provider configuration.
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.
When building a context, we read the dependency locks and ensure that
the provider requirements from the configuration can be satisfied.
If the configured requirements change such that the locks need to be
updated, we explain this and recommend running "terraform init".
This check is ignored for any providers which are locally marked as in
development. This includes unmanaged providers and those listed in the
provider installation `dev_overrides` block.
Martin Atkins