I frequently see people attempting to ask questions about Terraform's
error and warning messages but either only copying part of the message or
accidentally copying a surrounding paragraph that isn't part of the
message.
While I'm sure some of these are just "careless" mistakes, I've also
noticed that this has sometimes overlapped with someone asking a question
whose answer is written directly in the part of the message they didn't
include when copying, and so I have a theory that our current output
doesn't create a good enough visual hierarchy for sighted users to
understand where the diagnostic messages start and end when we show them
in close proximity to other content, or to other diagnostic messages.
As a result, some folks fail to notice the relevant message that might've
answered their question.
I tried a few different experiments for different approaches here, such
as adding more horizontal rules to the output and coloring the detail
text differently, but the approach that felt like the nicest compromise
to me was what's implemented here, which is to add a vertical line
along the left edge of each diagnostic message, colored to match with the
typical color we use for each diagnostic severity. This means that the
diagnostics end up slightly indented from what's around them, and the
vertical line seems to help subtly signal how we intended the content
to be grouped together.
In some terminal emulators, writing a character into the last column on a
row causes the terminal to immediately wrap to the beginning of the next
line, even if the very next character in the stream is a hard newline.
That can then lead to errant blank lines in the final output which make
it harder to navigate the visual hierarchy.
As a compromise to avoid this, we'll format our horizontal rules and
paragraphs to one column less than the terminal width. That does mean that
our horizontal rules won't _quite_ cover the whole terminal width, but
it seems like a good compromise in order to get consistent behavior across
a wider variety of terminal implementations.
We were previously using some ASCII art to create some visual divisions
between parts of the diagnostic output. Now that we are requiring a UTF-8
terminal we can print out box drawing characters instead.
We now require the output to accept UTF-8 and we can determine how wide
the terminal (if any) is, so here we begin to make use of that for the
"terraform plan" command.
The horizontal rule is now made of box drawing characters instead of
hyphens and fills the whole terminal width.
The paragraphs of text in the output are now also wrapped to fill the
terminal width, instead of the hard-wrapping we did before.
This is just a start down the road of making better use of the terminal
capabilities. Lots of other commands could benefit from updates like these
too.
Here we propagate in the initialized terminal.Streams from package main,
and then onwards to backends running in CLI mode.
This also replaces our use of helper/wrappedstreams to determine whether
stdin is a terminal or a pipe. helper/wrappedstreams returns incorrect
file descriptors on Windows, causing StdinPiped to always return false on
that platform and thus causing one of the odd behaviors discussed in
Finally, this includes some wrappers around the ability to look up the
number of columns in the terminal in preparation for use elsewhere. These
wrappers deal with the fact that our unit tests typically won't populate
meta.Streams.
After verifying the remote backend workspace version is compatible with
the local Terraform version, we need to record that this check was
successful. Otherwise the fallback error handling path will run a strict
version check, even if the versions are compatible, which will cause an
unexpected failure.
The revision field is only populated on dev builds so this means
most releases of Terraform have an empty "terraform_revision" field
in the JSON output. Since we recommend developers use go tooling
to `go build` this tool when developing, the revision is not useful
data and so it is removed.
When running state mv with a resource source, but the destination
fails, provide a hint that the source is a resource (not an instance)
in case the user means to address it this way
Using the addrTo after it has failed its check means <invalid>/no
address will be printed. Change this throughout, but particularly
add a test for the origin issue for this.
* command/state list: list resources in nested and expaneded modules
A few distinct bugs fixed in here:
There was a bug in the logic checking if a given module was the child of
the targetAddr, now fixed. That resolved the basic issue where resources
in nested submodules were not listed.
The logic around allowMissing needed some tweaking to allow for empty
modules, as long as those modules had submodules with resources. state
list is the only command using allowMissing with false so this felt safe
to do.
Finally I extended the logic so list would included expanded modules,
which is to say giving module.foo would result in resources from
module.foo[1], module.foo[0], etc.
* update state list docs to show that module filtering includes any nested
modules
Expressions such as "path.root" were returning the cwd (or modulePath),
instead of the usual _relative_ path. This commit normalizes the path
before building the context.
Also uncomment and fix some tests which had been skipped for a couple of
years. Those validate cases work now!
Note that these test cases and the JSON output are not especially
minimized, making them snapshot/golden tests. The output looks correct
at time of writing, and we don't expect to change validate significantly
any time soon, but if we do there will be some churn here.
We included these warnings in v0.14 after noticing that we'd accidentally
published some incorrect documentation about the purpose of the plugin
cache directory under .terraform/plugins. We switched to using
.terraform/providers instead so that we could treat any missing providers
that appear in the legacy directory as likely to be a result of following
that documentation, and thus produce this extra warning.
However, the further we get from v0.13 the more likely it is for this
warning to be a confusing false positive rather than something helpful,
and this is a non-trivial codepath requiring us to retain a concept that
we otherwise don't need (the "legacy cache dir"), so here we'll remove
those warnings and support code for v0.15 onwards.
These warnings were always accompanied by an error message saying that a
provider could not be found, and that error message remains after this
change. This just removes the "by the way..."-style warning we had been
emitting alongside the errors.
If a user forgets to specify the source address for a provider, Terraform
will assume they meant a provider in the registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/
namespace. If that ultimately doesn't exist, we'll now try to see if
there's some other provider source address recorded in the registry's
legacy provider lookup table, and suggest it if so.
The error message here is a terse one addressed primarily to folks who are
already somewhat familiar with provider source addresses and how to
specify them. Terraform v0.13 had a more elaborate version of this error
message which directed the user to try the v0.13 automatic upgrade tool,
but we no longer have that available in v0.14 and later so the user must
make the fix themselves.
The upstream bug with opening a browser on Windows Subsystem for Linux
has been fixed, so this reverts our local patch for this. The approach
upstream adds fallback support for x-www-browser and www-browser if
xdg-open fails, and this fixes the problem on WSL.
This reverts commit 12e090ce48.
So far the output command has had a default output format intended for
human consumption and a JSON output format intended for machine
consumption.
However, until Terraform v0.14 the default output format for primitive
types happened to be _almost_ a raw string representation of the value,
and so users started using that as a more convenient way to access
primitive-typed output values from shell scripts, avoiding the need to
also use a tool like "jq" to decode the JSON.
Recognizing that primitive-typed output values are common and that
processing them with shell scripts is common, this commit introduces a new
-raw mode which is explicitly intended for that use-case, guaranteeing
that the result will always be the direct result of a string conversion
of the output value, or an error if no such conversion is possible.
Our policy elsewhere in Terraform is that we always use JSON for
machine-readable output. We adopted that policy because our other
machine-readable output has typically been complex data structures rather
than single primitive values. A special mode seems justified for output
values because it is common for root module output values to be just
strings, and so it's pragmatic to offer access to the raw value directly
rather than requiring a round-trip through JSON.
As of Terraform 0.13+, the get-plugins command has been
superceded by new provider installation mechanisms, and
general philosophy (providers are always installed, but
the sources may be customized). Updat the init command
to give users a warning if they are setting this flag,
to encourage them to remove it from their workflow, and
update relevant docs and docstrings as well
* command/format: concise diff is no longer an experiment
Since state formatting goes through the "diff" printer, I have
repurposed the concise flag as a verbose flag, used only when printing
state. It's silly but it works!
* remove helper/experiment
With this experiment concluded, we no longer need helper/experiment. The
shadow experiment had not been touched in many years, so I removed all
references, and removed the package entirely. Any new experiments are
expected to be configuration experiments handled by our (other)
experiments package.
* check for the verbose flag consistently, in case we end up using it in plans in the future
Martin Atkins