We've historically been somewhat inconsistent in how we refer to the
type of object defined by "variable" blocks in configuration. Parts of
our documentation refer to them as "input variables" or just "variables",
while our implementation refers to them as "user variables".
Since Terraform Registry is now also referring to these as "Inputs", here
we standardize on "Input Variable" as the fully-qualified name for this
concept, with "variable" being a shorthand for this where context is
obvious. Outside of this context, anything that can be referred to in
an interpolation expression is generically known as a "variable", with
Input Variables being just one kind, specified by the "var." prefix.
While this terminology shift is not critical yet, it will become more
important as we start to document the new version of the configuration
language so we can use the generic meaning of "variable" there.
The bulk of the text on this page hasn't been revised for some time and
so parts of it were using non-idiomatic terminology or not defining terms
at all.
The main goal of this revision is to standardize on the following terms:
- "provider configuration" refers to a specific provider block in config,
as a distinct idea from the provider _itself_, which is a singleton.
- "Default" vs. "additional" provider configurations, distinguishing
those without and with "alias" arguments respectively. These are named
here so that we can use this terminology to describe the different
behaviors of each for the purposes of provider inheritance between
modules.
This allows the user to customize the location where Terraform stores
the files normally placed in the ".terraform" subdirectory, if e.g. the
current working directory is not writable.
The modules mechanism has changed quite a bit for version 0.11 and so
although simple usage remains broadly compatible there are some
significant changes in the behavior of more complex modules.
Since large parts of this were rewritten anyway, I also took the
opportunity to do some copy-editing to make the prose on this page more
consistent with our usual editorial voice and to wrap the long
lines.
Since we don't currently auto-install provisioner plugins this is
currently placed on the providers documentation page and referred to as
the "Provider Plugin Cache". In future this mechanism may also apply to
provisioners, in which case we'll figure out at that point where better
to place this information so it can be referenced from both the provider
and provisioner documentation pages.
This mechanism for configuring plugins is now deprecated, since it's not
capable of declaring plugin versions. Instead, we recommend just placing
plugins into a particular directory, which is now documented on the
main providers documentation page and linked from the more detailed docs
on plugins in general.
This function takes a map of lists of strings and inverts it so that
the string values become keys and the keys become items within the
corresponding lists.
Previously the -upgrade option was covered only on the "terraform init" usage page. It seems also worth mentioning in the main docs on provider versioning, since we're already explaining here other mechanics of the versioning/constraints system.
This escapes all characters that might have a special interpretation when embedded into a portion of a URL, including slashes, equals signs and ampersands.
Since Terraform's internals are not 8-bit clean (it assumes UTF-8
strings), we can't implement raw gzip directly. We're going to add
support where it makes sense for passing data to attributes as
base64 so that the result of this function can be used.
Michael Mell