* 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>
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".
Implement a new provider_meta block in the terraform block of modules, allowing provider-keyed metadata to be communicated from HCL to provider binaries.
Bundled in this change for minimal protocol version bumping is the addition of markdown support for attribute descriptions and the ability to indicate when an attribute is deprecated, so this information can be shown in the schema dump.
Co-authored-by: Paul Tyng <paul@paultyng.net>
We have released the v0.12-oriented content to the website early in order
to support the beta process, but in some places we neglected to explicitly
mark features or content as being v0.12-only.
Here we add explicit markers to the main cases we've seen where readers
have reported confusion, along with some other tweaks in similar vein.
Now includes more complete information on usage of private registries and
updates the module registry API documentation to include the new
version-enumeration endpoint along with describing Terraform's discovery
protocol.
Previously we just assumed the reader was familiar with the idea of a
graph but didn't explain it.
Since graphs are an implementation detail of Terraform, rather than
essential information needed for new users, this revises the introduction
text to talk only about _dependencies_, which we assume the user is
familiar with as a more practical concept.
Additionally, Paul Hinze did a great talk on how Terraform uses graphs
at HashiConf 2016 which is good additional content for our existing
"Graph Internals" page, which includes a concise explanation of the
basics of graph theory.
Nick Fagerlund