We previously covered everything about using providers on a single page,
but that was getting unwieldy already and we now have a lot more to
discuss with v0.13 introducing a new source address syntax and some other
concepts.
Here we split the provider-related content into two parts: "Provider
Requirements" covers how to find and declare dependencies on providers,
and then "Provider Configuration" (formerly just "Providers") then focuses
primarily on how to write zero or more provider configurations for a
particular provider.
Because "Provider Requirements" is now presented before "Provider
Configuration" in the navigation, I've also moved some of the introductory
content about providers in general onto the "Requirements" page. The
first paragraph of that content is duplicated onto the "Configuration"
page for discoverability, but we now link to the requirements page to get
the full story.
The "Configuration Language" section was becoming rather unweildy, both
by having a lot of pages and by some of the pages being quite large in
themselves.
This is a first step towards breaking things up a little more, starting
with two changes:
- The "Configuration Language" navigation is now split into two
sub-headings "Configuration Blocks" and "Syntax".
- Some of the information about sub-blocks of the "terraform" block are
now given their own pages, because their content is quite complex
in itself.
- "Version Constraints" is now a page in its own right, rather than this
content being duplicated in slightly different forms across multiple
contexts that make use of user-specified version constraints.
We previously had the module registry protocol documented only as an
undefined subset of the full API of the official registry implementation.
However, the vast majority of endpoints documented in the official API
docs are not needed for a headless third-party module registry that only
intends to make modules available to Terraform CLI.
To make this clearer to potential third-party implementors, and also for
consistency with how the provider registry protocol is now documented,
here we create a new page to describe the subset required for all
registries, and then explain in the docs for the offical API that
potential third-party implementors should refer to the new page instead.
The longer page describing the full API of the official implementations
remains for those who wish to write clients for that API, because it is
part of the API surface area for Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise.
I also took this opportunity to address the fact that module addresses
don't really contain "provider names" at all, but rather than the fourth
field in the address is _conventionally_ an official provider name but
can really be any string that serves to differentiate multiple
implementations of the same abstraction. The new docs therefore refer to
this field as "system" rather than "provider".
Currently the example config for the Consul backend uses a live Consul demo cluster at `demo.consul.io`. This results in TF state with sensitive information and all being stored on a public site when users just copy and paste the config. This PR changes it so that the config address isn't the public demo cluster.
This new command is intended to make it easy to create or update a mirror
directory containing suitable providers for the current configuration,
producing a layout that is appropriate both for a filesystem mirror or,
if copied into the document root of an HTTP server, a network mirror.
This initial version is not customizable aside from being able to select
multiple platforms to install packages for.
Future iterations of this could include commands to turn the JSON index
generation on and off, or to instruct it to produce the unpacked directory
layout instead of the packed directory layout as it currently does. Both
of those options would make the generated directory unsuitable to be
a network mirror, but it would still work as a filesystem mirror.
In the long run this will hopefully form part of a replacement workflow to
terraform-bundle as a way to put copies of providers somewhere so we don't
need to re-download them every time, but some other changes will be needed
outside of just this command before that'd be true, such as adding support
for network and/or filesystem mirrors in Terraform Enterprise.
When helping folks in the community forum, I commonly see questions around
more complex patterns in transforming deep data structures into different
shapes to work with for_each. We have examples of these patterns in the
docs for the functions that they rely on, but they were not previously
very discoverable in the main configuration language documentation
sections.
Here I've moved the "Using Expressions in for_each" subsection on the
Resources page above some of the other sub-sections to hopefully make it
easier to see, and written out in more detail the two specific patterns
that answer a significant number of for_each-related user questions in
the hope that readers will be more likely to realize that the links are
relevant to what their goals.
I also added some more elaboration about the behavior of converting from
list to set in the "Using Sets" subsection, because this feature is often
a user's first encounter with the set data type and I've inferred from
some of the questions I've answered that a number of Terraform users don't
have prior experience with set data types in other languages to draw
assumptions from.
Finally, I added some similar links to the for_each patterns within the
for expression documentation itself, to try to make those examples more
visible to those who might be discovering the documentation in a different
sequence, e.g. by following a deep link shared in an answer to a question
in the community forum.
The "apply" documentation contained a simple typo, while the "plan"
documentation contained outdated information about using
"terraform plan PLANFILE" to view a plan. The latter is now a separate
command entirely, since Terraform 0.12: "terraform show PLANFILE".
This is a baby-step towards an intended future where all Terraform actions
which have side-effects in either remote objects or the Terraform state
can go through the plan+apply workflow.
This initial change is focused only on allowing plan+apply for changes to
root module output values, so that these can be written into a new state
snapshot (for consumption by terraform_remote_state elsewhere) without
having to go outside of the primary workflow by running
"terraform refresh".
This is also better than "terraform refresh" because it gives an
opportunity to review the proposed changes before applying them, as we're
accustomed to with resource changes.
The downside here is that Terraform Core was not designed to produce
accurate changesets for root module outputs. Although we added a place for
it in the plan model in Terraform 0.12, Terraform Core currently produces
inaccurate changesets there which don't properly track the prior values.
We're planning to rework Terraform Core's evaluation approach in a
forthcoming release so it would itself be able to distinguish between the
prior state and the planned new state to produce an accurate changeset,
but this commit introduces a temporary stop-gap solution of implementing
the logic up in the local backend code, where we can freeze a snapshot of
the prior state before we take any other actions and then use that to
produce an accurate output changeset to decide whether the plan has
externally-visible side-effects and render any changes to output values.
This temporary approach should be replaced by a more appropriately-placed
solution in Terraform Core in a release, which should then allow further
behaviors in similar vein, such as user-visible drift detection for
resource instances.
All of the feedback from the experiment described enhancements that can
potentially be added later without breaking changes, so this change simply
removes the experiment gate from the feature as originally implemented
with no changes to its functionality.
Further enhancements may follow in later releases, but the goal of this
change is just to ship the feature exactly as it was under the experiment.
Most of the changes here are cleaning up the experiment opt-ins from our
test cases. The most important parts are in configs/experiments.go and in
experiments/experiment.go .
* website: Edit text of new TF_IGNORE env var docs
Fixing one broken link, and tidying the sentences a bit.
* typo
Co-authored-by: Pam Selle <pam@hashicorp.com>
Alisdair McDiarmid