The existing "type" argument allows specifying a type constraint that
allows for some basic validation, but often there are more constraints on
a variable value than just its type.
This new feature (requiring an experiment opt-in for now, while we refine
it) allows specifying arbitrary validation rules for any variable which
can then cause custom error messages to be returned when a caller provides
an inappropriate value.
variable "example" {
validation {
condition = var.example != "nope"
error_message = "Example value must not be \"nope\"."
}
}
The core parts of this are designed to do as little new work as possible
when no validations are specified, and thus the main new checking codepath
here can therefore only run when the experiment is enabled in order to
permit having validations.
These are intended to make it easier to work with arbitrary data
structures whose shape might not be known statically, such as the result
of jsondecode(...) or yamldecode(...) of data from a separate system.
For example, in an object value which has attributes that may or may not
be set we can concisely provide a fallback value to use when the attribute
isn't set:
try(local.example.foo, "fallback-foo")
Using a "try to evaluate" model rather than explicit testing fits better
with the usual programming model of the Terraform language where values
are normally automatically converted to the necessary type where possible:
the given expression is subject to all of the same normal type conversions,
which avoids inadvertently creating a more restrictive evaluation model
as might happen if this were handled using checks like a hypothetical
isobject(...) function, etc.
In earlier versions of Terraform the result of terraform state show was
in the pre-0.12 "flatmap" structure that was unable to reflect nested
data structures. That was fixed in Terraform 0.12, but as a consequence
this statement about the output being machine-parseable (which was
debateable even in older versions) is incorrect.
Fortunately, we now have "terraform show -json" to get output that is
intentionally machine-parseable, so we'll recommend to use that instead
here. The JSON output of that command is a superset of what's produced by
"terraform state show", so should be usable to meet any use-case that
might previously have been met by parsing the "terraform state show"
output.
Right now, the only environment variable available is the same
environment variable that will be picked up by the GCP provider. Users
would like to be able to store state in separate projects or accounts or
otherwise authenticate to the provider with a service account that
doesn't have access to the state. This seems like a reasonable enough
practice to me, and the solution seems straightforward--offer an
environment variable that doesn't mean anything to the provider to
configure the backend credentials. I've added GOOGLE_BACKEND_CREDENTIALS
to manage just the backend credentials, and documented it appropriately.
It's a common source of errors to try to produce JSON or YAML syntax
using string concatenation via our template language but to miss some
details like correct string escaping, quoting, required commas, etc.
The jsonencode and yamlencode functions are a better way to generate JSON
and YAML, but it's not immediately obvious that both of these functions
are available for use in external templates (via templatefile) too.
Given that questions related to this come up a lot in our community forum
and elsewhere, it seems worth having a documentation section to show the
pattern of having a template that consists only of a single function call.
When warnings appear in isolation (not accompanied by an error) it's
reasonable to want to defer resolving them for a while because they are
not actually blocking immediate work.
However, our warning messages tend to be long by default in order to
include all of the necessary context to understand the implications of
the warning, and that can make them overwhelming when combined with other
output.
As a compromise, this adds a new CLI option -compact-warnings which is
supported for all the main operation commands and which uses a more
compact format to print out warnings as long as they aren't also
accompanied by errors.
The default remains unchanged except that the threshold for consolidating
warning messages is reduced to one so that we'll now only show one of
each distinct warning summary.
Full warning messages are always shown if there's at least one error
included in the diagnostic set too, because in that case the warning
message could contain additional context to help understand the error.
Martin Atkins