The usual usage of diagnostics requires us to pass around source location
information to everywhere that might generate a diagnostic, and that is
always the best way to get the most precise diagnostic source locations.
However, it's impractical to require source location information to be
retained in every Terraform subsystem, and so this new idea of "contextual
diagnostics" allows us to separate the generation of a diagnostic from
the resolution of its source location, instead resolving the location
information as a post-processing step once the call stack unwinds to a
place where there is enough context to find it.
This is necessarily a less precise approach than reading the source ranges
directly from the configuration AST, but gives us an alternative to no
diagnostics at all in portions of Terraform where full location
information is not available.
This is a best-effort sort of thing which will get as precise as it can
but may return a range in a parent block if the precise location of a
particular attribute cannot be found. Diagnostics that rely on this
mechanism should include some other contextual information in the detail
message to make up for any loss of precision that results.
In the long run we'd like to offer machine-readable output for more
commands, but for now we'll just start with a tactical feature in
"terraform validate" since this is useful for automated testing scenarios,
editor integrations, etc, and doesn't include any representations of types
that are expected to have breaking changes in the near future.
As part of some light reorganization of our commands, this new
implementation no longer does validation of variables and will thus avoid
the need to spin up a fully-valid context. Instead, its focus is on
validating the configuration itself, regardless of any variables, state,
etc.
This change anticipates us later adding a -validate-only flag to
"terraform plan" which will then take over the related use-case of
checking if a particular execution of Terraform is valid, _including_ the
state, variables, etc.
Although leaving variables out of validate feels pretty arbitrary today
while all of the variable sources are local anyway, we have plans to
allow per-workspace variables to be stored in the backend in future and
at that point it will no longer be possible to fully validate variables
without accessing the backend. The "terraform plan" command explicitly
requires access to the backend, while "terraform validate" is now
explicitly for local-only validation of a single module.
In a future commit this will be extended to do basic type checking of
the configuration based on provider schemas, etc.
We need to share a single config loader across all callers because that
allows us to maintain the source code cache we'll use for snippets in
error messages.
Nothing calls this yet. Callers will be gradually updated away from Module
and Config in subsequent commits.
If we get a diagnostic message that references a source range, and if the
source code for the referenced file is available, we'll show a snippet of
the source code with the source range highlighted.
At the moment we have no cache of source code, so in practice this
codepath can never be visited. Callers to format.Diagnostic will be
gradually updated in subsequent commits.
In some cases this is needed to keep the UX clean and to make sure any remote exit codes are passed through to the local process.
The most obvious example for this is when using the "remote" backend. This backend runs Terraform remotely and stream the output back to the local terminal.
When an error occurs during the remote execution, all the needed error information will already be in the streamed output. So if we then return an error ourselves, users will get the same errors twice.
By allowing the backend to specify the correct exit code, the UX remains the same while preserving the correct exit codes.
Martin Atkins