Previously we forced all remote state backends to be wrapped in a
BackupState wrapper that generates a local "terraform.tfstate.backup"
file before updating the remote state.
This backup mechanism was motivated by allowing users to recover a
previous state if user error caused an undesirable change such as loss
of the record of one or more resources. However, it also has the downside
of flushing a possibly-sensitive state to local disk in a location where
users may not realize its purpose and accidentally check it into version
control. Those using remote state would generally prefer that state never
be flushed to local disk at all.
The use-case of recovering older states can be dealt with for remote
backends by selecting a backend that has preservation of older versions
as a first-class feature, such as S3 versioning or Terraform Enterprise's
first-class historical state versioning mechanism.
There remains still one case where state can be flushed to local disk: if
a write to the remote backend fails during "terraform apply" then we will
still create the "errored.tfstate" file to allow the user to recover. This
seems like a reasonable compromise because this is done only in an
_exceptional_ case, and the console output makes it very clear that this
file has been created.
Fixes#15339.
In #15884 we adjusted the plan output to give an explicit command to run
to apply a plan, whereas before this command was just alluded to in the
prose.
Since releasing that, we've got good feedback that it's confusing to
include such instructions when Terraform is running in a workflow
automation tool, because such tools usually abstract away exactly what
commands are run and require users to take different actions to
proceed through the workflow.
To accommodate such environments while retaining helpful messages for
normal CLI usage, here we introduce a new environment variable
TF_IN_AUTOMATION which, when set to a non-empty value, is a hint to
Terraform that it isn't being run in an interactive command shell and
it should thus tone down the "next steps" messaging.
The documentation for this setting is included as part of the "...in
automation" guide since it's not generally useful in other cases. We also
intentionally disclaim comprehensive support for this since we want to
avoid creating an extreme number of "if running in automation..."
codepaths that would increase the testing matrix and hurt maintainability.
The focus is specifically on the output of the three commands we give in
the automation guide, which at present means the following two situations:
* "terraform init" does not include the final paragraphs that suggest
running "terraform plan" and tell you in what situations you might need
to re-run "terraform init".
* "terraform plan" does not include the final paragraphs that either
warn about not specifying "-out=..." or instruct to run
"terraform apply" with the generated plan file.
During plan and apply, because the provider constraints need to be built
from a plan, they are not checked until the terraform.Context is
created. Since the context is always requested by the backend during the
Operation, the backend needs to be responsible for generating contextual
error messages for the user.
Instead of formatting the ResolveProviders errors during NewContext,
return a special error type, ResourceProviderError to signal that
init will be required. The backend can then extract and format the
errors.
We're shifting terminology from "environment" to "workspace". This takes
care of some of the main internal API surface that was using the old
terminology, though is not intended to be entirely comprehensive and is
mainly just to minimize the amount of confusion for maintainers as we
continue moving towards eliminating the old terminology.
This allows you to run multiple concurrent terraform operations against
different environments from the same source directory.
Fixes#14447.
Also removes some dead code which appears to do the same thing as the function I
modified.
Add Env and SetEnv methods to command.Meta to retrieve the current
environment name inside any command.
Make sure all calls to Backend.State contain an environment name, and
make the package compile against the update backend package.
Forgot to remove the currentState field, which was not always set. The
current state should always just be read from the environment file.
Always return the default state name when we can't determine the state.
Split the interface to change environments out from the minimal Backend
interface, to make it optional for backend implementations. If
backend.MultiState isn't implemented, return a "not implemented" from
environment related methods.
Have the Local backend delegate the MultiState methods to the proper
backend.
I made this interface way back with the original backend work and I
guess I forgot to hook it up! This is becoming an issue as I'm working
on our 2nd enhanced backend that requires this information and I
realized it was hardcoded before.
This propertly uses the CLIInit interface allowing any backend to gain
access to this data.
The local backend implementation is an implementation of
backend.Enhanced that recreates all the behavior of the CLI but through
the backend interface.
Martin Atkins