It's not normally necessary to make explicit type conversions in Terraform
because the language implicitly converts as necessary, but explicit
conversions are useful in a few specialized cases:
- When defining output values for a reusable module, it may be desirable
to force a "cleaner" output type than would naturally arise from a
computation, such as forcing a string containing digits into a number.
- Our 0.12upgrade mechanism will use some of these to replace use of the
undocumented, hidden type conversion functions in HIL, and force
particular type interpretations in some tricky cases.
- We've found that type conversion functions can be useful as _temporary_
workarounds for bugs in Terraform and in providers where implicit type
conversion isn't working correctly or a type constraint isn't specified
precisely enough for the automatic conversion behavior.
These all follow the same convention of being named "to" followed by a
short type name. Since we've had a long-standing convention of running all
the words together in lowercase in function names, we stick to that here
even though some of these names are quite strange, because these should
be rarely-used functions anyway.
The sethaselement, setintersection, and setunion functions are defined in
the cty stdlib. Making them available in Terraform will make it easier to
work with sets, and complement the currently-Terraform-specific setproduct
function.
In the long run setproduct should probably move into the cty stdlib too,
but since it was submitted as a Terraform function originally we'll leave
it here now for simplicity's sake and reorganize later.
In our new world it produces either a set of a tuple type or a list of a
tuple type, depending on the given argument types.
The resulting collection's element tuple type is decided by the element
types of the given collections, allowing type information to propagate
even if unknown values are present.
Cycle through the shim operations after Apply, to ensure that we can
converge on a stable value for for Plan. While the shims produce valid
values in both directions, helper/schema sometimes does not agree on
which containers should be empty or null.
There are a few constructs from 0.11 and prior that cause 0.12 parsing to
fail altogether, which previously created a chicken/egg problem because
we need to install the providers in order to run "terraform 0.12upgrade"
and thus fix the problem.
This changes "terraform init" to use the new "early configuration" loader
for module and provider installation. This is built on the more permissive
parser in the terraform-config-inspect package, and so it allows us to
read out the top-level blocks from the configuration while accepting
legacy HCL syntax.
In the long run this will let us do version compatibility detection before
attempting a "real" config load, giving us better error messages for any
future syntax additions, but in the short term the key thing is that it
allows us to install the dependencies even if the configuration isn't
fully valid.
Because backend init still requires full configuration, this introduces a
new mode of terraform init where it detects heuristically if it seems like
we need to do a configuration upgrade and does a partial init if so,
before finally directing the user to run "terraform 0.12upgrade" before
running any other commands.
The heuristic here is based on two assumptions:
- If the "early" loader finds no errors but the normal loader does, the
configuration is likely to be valid for Terraform 0.11 but not 0.12.
- If there's already a version constraint in the configuration that
excludes Terraform versions prior to v0.12 then the configuration is
probably _already_ upgraded and so it's just a normal syntax error,
even if the early loader didn't detect it.
Once the upgrade process is removed in 0.13.0 (users will be required to
go stepwise 0.11 -> 0.12 -> 0.13 to upgrade after that), some of this can
be simplified to remove that special mode, but the idea of doing the
dependency version checks against the liberal parser will remain valuable
to increase our chances of reporting version-based incompatibilities
rather than syntax errors as we add new features in future.
This is an adaptation of the installation code from configs/configload,
now using the "earlyconfig" package instead of the "configs" package.
Module installation is an initialization-only process, with all other
commands assuming an already-initialized directory. Having it here can
therefore simplify the API of configs/configload, which can now focus only
on the problem of loading modules that have already been installed.
The old installer code in configs/configload is still in place for now
because the caller in "terraform init" isn't yet updated to use this.
"terraform init" is quite a complex beast in relation to other commands
since almost everything it does is unique to it and thus not factored out
into other packages.
To get some of that sprawl out of the "command" package, this new internal
package will give us somewhere to put this init functionality that is
also useful for test code that needs to mimic the initialization behavior
against fixture directories.
This is an alternative to the full config loader in the "configs" package
that is good for "early" use-cases like "terraform init", where we want
to find out what our dependencies are without getting tripped up on any
other errors that might be present.
Martin Atkins