* 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>
As part of documenting the new module for_each capabilities we added a
section noting that shared modules using the legacy pattern of declaring
their own provider configurations would not be compatible with them.
However, that also applies to the new module depends_on and several folks
participating in the beta pointed out that the documentation wasn't
discussing that at all.
In order to generalize the advice, I've moved the old content we had
(since v0.11) recommending against provider configurations in shared
modules out into its own section, now being more explicit that it is
a legacy pattern and not recommended, and then folded the content about
for_each and count, now also including depends_on, into that expanded
section.
As is often the case, that had some knock-on effects on the content on
the rest of this page, so there's some general editing and reorganization
here. In particular, I moved the "Multiple Instances of a Module" section
much further up the page because it's content relevant to users of
shared modules, while the later content on this page is more aimed at
authors of shared modules, including the new section about the legacy
pattern.
We previously covered everything about using providers on a single page,
but that was getting unwieldy already and we now have a lot more to
discuss with v0.13 introducing a new source address syntax and some other
concepts.
Here we split the provider-related content into two parts: "Provider
Requirements" covers how to find and declare dependencies on providers,
and then "Provider Configuration" (formerly just "Providers") then focuses
primarily on how to write zero or more provider configurations for a
particular provider.
Because "Provider Requirements" is now presented before "Provider
Configuration" in the navigation, I've also moved some of the introductory
content about providers in general onto the "Requirements" page. The
first paragraph of that content is duplicated onto the "Configuration"
page for discoverability, but we now link to the requirements page to get
the full story.
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.
When helping folks in the community forum, I commonly see questions around
more complex patterns in transforming deep data structures into different
shapes to work with for_each. We have examples of these patterns in the
docs for the functions that they rely on, but they were not previously
very discoverable in the main configuration language documentation
sections.
Here I've moved the "Using Expressions in for_each" subsection on the
Resources page above some of the other sub-sections to hopefully make it
easier to see, and written out in more detail the two specific patterns
that answer a significant number of for_each-related user questions in
the hope that readers will be more likely to realize that the links are
relevant to what their goals.
I also added some more elaboration about the behavior of converting from
list to set in the "Using Sets" subsection, because this feature is often
a user's first encounter with the set data type and I've inferred from
some of the questions I've answered that a number of Terraform users don't
have prior experience with set data types in other languages to draw
assumptions from.
Finally, I added some similar links to the for_each patterns within the
for expression documentation itself, to try to make those examples more
visible to those who might be discovering the documentation in a different
sequence, e.g. by following a deep link shared in an answer to a question
in the community forum.
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 .
This is an initial draft of documentation for this new feature of the
CLI configuration. This is mainly intended as a placeholder for now,
because there are other documentation updates pending for the new provider
namespacing and installation scheme and we'll likely want to revise these
docs to better complement the broader documentation once it's written.
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>
Previously the templatefile function would permit any arbitrary string as
a variable name, but due to the HCL template syntax it would be impossible
to refer to one that isn't a valid HCL identifier without causing an
HCL syntax error.
The HCL syntax errors are correct, but don't really point to the root
cause of the problem. Instead, we'll pre-verify that the variable names
are valid before we even try to render the template, and given a
specialized error message that refers to the vars argument expression as
the problematic part, which will hopefully make the resolution path
clearer for a user encountering this situation.
The syntax error still remains for situations where all of the variable
names are correct but e.g. the user made a typo referring to one, which
makes sense because in that case the problem _is_ inside the template.