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.
Previously we required callers to separately call .Validate on the root
module to determine if there were any value errors, but we did that
inconsistently and would thus see crashes in some cases where later code
would try to use invalid configuration as if it were valid.
Now we run .Validate automatically after config loading, returning the
resulting diagnostics. Since we return a diagnostics here, it's possible
to return both warnings and errors.
We return the loaded module even if it's invalid, so callers are free to
ignore returned errors and try to work with the config anyway, though they
will need to be defensive against invalid configuration themselves in
that case.
As a result of this, all of the commands that load configuration now need
to use diagnostic printing to signal errors. For the moment this just
allows us to return potentially-multiple config errors/warnings in full
fidelity, but also sets us up for later when more subsystems are able
to produce rich diagnostics so we can show them all together.
Finally, this commit also removes some stale, commented-out code for the
"legacy" (pre-0.8) graph implementation, which has not been available
for some time.
Validation is the best time to return detailed diagnostics
to the user since we're much more likely to have source
location information, etc than we are in later operations.
This change doesn't actually add any detail to the messages
yet, but it changes the interface so that we can gradually
introduce more detailed diagnostics over time.
While here there are some minor adjustments to some of the
messages to improve their consistency with terminology we
use elsewhere.
This uses the new diagnostics printer for config-related errors in the
main five commands that deal with config.
The immediate motivation for this is to allow HCL2-produced diagnostics
to be printed out in their full fidelity, though it also slightly changes
the presentation of other errors so that they are not presented in all
red text, which can be hard to read on some terminals.
Martin Atkins