We expect that in order to continue to evolve the language without
breaking existing modules we will at some point need to have a way to mark
when a particular module is expecting a newer interpretation of the
language.
Although it's too early to do any deep preparation for that, this commit
aims to proactively reserve an argument named "language" inside
"terraform" blocks, which currently only accepts the keyword TF2021 that
is intended to represent "the edition of the Terraform language as defined
in 2021".
That argument also defaults to TF2021 if not set, so in practice there's
no real reason to set this today, but this minimal validation today is
intended to give better feedback to users of older Terraform versions in
the event that we introduce a new language edition later and they try to
use an module incompatible with their Terraform version.
This builds on an experimental feature in the underlying cty library which
allows marking specific attribtues of an object type constraint as
optional, which in turn modifies how the cty conversion package handles
missing attributes in a source value: it will silently substitute a null
value of the appropriate type rather than returning an error.
In order to implement the experiment this commit temporarily forks the
HCL typeexpr extension package into a local internal/typeexpr package,
where I've extended the type constraint syntax to allow annotating object
type attributes as being optional using the HCL function call syntax.
If the experiment is successful -- both at the Terraform layer and in
the underlying cty library -- we'll likely send these modifications to
upstream HCL so that other HCL-based languages can potentially benefit
from this new capability.
Because it's experimental, the optional attribute modifier is allowed only
with an explicit opt-in to the module_variable_optional_attrs experiment.
All of the feedback from the experiment described enhancements that can
potentially be added later without breaking changes, so this change simply
removes the experiment gate from the feature as originally implemented
with no changes to its functionality.
Further enhancements may follow in later releases, but the goal of this
change is just to ship the feature exactly as it was under the experiment.
Most of the changes here are cleaning up the experiment opt-ins from our
test cases. The most important parts are in configs/experiments.go and in
experiments/experiment.go .
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.
Traditionally we've preferred to release new language features in major
releases only, because we can then use the beta cycle to gather feedback
on the feature and learn about any usability challenges or other
situations we didn't consider during our design in time to make those
changes before inclusion in a stable release.
This "experiments" feature is intended to decouple the feedback cycle for
new features from the major release rhythm, and thus allow us to release
new features in minor releases by first releasing them as experimental for
a minor release or two, adjust for any feedback gathered during that
period, and then finally remove the experiment gate and enable the feature
for everyone.
The intended model here is that anything behind an experiment gate is
subject to breaking changes even in patch releases, and so any module
using these experimental features will be broken by a future Terraform
upgrade.
The behavior implemented here is:
- Recognize a new "experiments" setting in the "terraform" block which
allows module authors to explicitly opt in to experimental features.
terraform {
experiments = [resource_for_each]
}
- Generate a warning whenever loading a module that has experiments
enabled, to avoid accidentally depending on experimental features and
thus risking unexpected breakage on next Terraform upgrade.
- We check the enabled experiments against the configuration at module
load time, which means that experiments are scoped to a particular
module. Enabling an experiment in one module does not automatically
enable it in any other module.
This experiments mechanism is itself an experiment, and so I'd like to
use the resource for_each feature to trial it. Because any configuration
using experiments is subject to breaking changes, we are free to adjust
this experiments feature in future releases as we see fit, but once
for_each is shipped without an experiment gate we'll be blocked from
making significant changes to it until the next major release at least.
Martin Atkins