...and also shrink the explanation for alternate sharing approaches, a bit.
Actually, it looks like I already half-adopted it by accident. 😬 But this
commit adds it to the sidebar under "State", so users can browse to it. I'm
leaving the URL alone, because it's not urgent and we'll need to adjust a large
swath of URLs at some point anyway.
This change effectively stops presenting `terraform` as a provider in the normal
sense, and reduces /docs/providers/terraform/index.html to a ghost page in the
language section (to avoid breaking links for the time being). The message a
reader should get is that Terraform has one special built-in data source where
you don't need to think about the provider or its version.
As of December 18, 2020, we've redirected nearly all of the provider
documentation that used to live on terraform.io:
- For providers that got published on the Registry, we redirected each docs page
to the corresponding Registry docs page.
- For providers that never got adopted by a new publisher, we archived the
GitHub repository and redirected each docs page to the corresponding Markdown
source file on github.com. (For an example of these redirects, see
https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/telefonicaopencloud/r/s3_bucket.html)
There are ten providers left that we haven't redirected. These ones got adopted
by new publishers and _will_ end up on the Registry, but they aren't quite ready
to ship and get their permanent redirects, and we don't want to sabotage their
SEO by 301ing to a temporary destination.
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,.
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.
* 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>
Nick Fagerlund