It's been a long time since we gave this page an overhaul, and with our
ongoing efforts to make plan and apply incorporate all of the side-effects
that might need to be done against a configuration it seems like a good
time for some restructuring in that vein.
The starting idea here is to formally split the many "terraform plan"
options into a few different categories:
- Planning modes
- Planning options
- Other options
The planning modes and options are the subset that are also accepted by
"terraform apply" when it's running in its default mode of generating a
plan and then prompting for interactive approval of it. This then allows
us to avoid duplicating all of that information on the "terraform apply"
page, and thus allows us to spend more words discussing each of them.
This set of docs is intended as a fresh start into which we'll be able to
more surgically add in the information about -refresh-only and -replace=...
once we have those implemented. Consequently there are some parts of this
which may seem a little overwraught for what it's currently describing;
that's a result of my having prepared this by just deleting the
-refresh-only and -replace=... content from our initial docs draft and
submitted the result, in anticipation of re-adding the parts I've deleted
here in the very near future in other commits.
We have these funny extra options that date back to before Terraform even
had remote state, which we've preserved along the way by most recently
incorporating them as special-case overrides for the local backend.
The documentation we had for these has grown less accurate over time as
the details have shifted, and was in many cases missing the requisite
caveats that they are only for the local backend and that backend
configuration is the modern, preferred way to deal with the use-cases they
were intended for.
We always have a bit of a tension with this sort of legacy option because
we want to keep them documented just enough to be useful to someone who
finds an existing script/etc using them and wants to know what they do,
but not to take up so much space that they might distract users from
finding the modern alternative they should consider instead.
As a compromise in that vein here I've created a new section about these
options under the local backend documentation, which then gives us the
space to go into some detail about the various behaviors and interactions
and also to discuss their history and our recommended alternatives. I then
simplified all of the other mentions of these in command documentation
to just link to or refer to the local backend documentation. My hope then
is that folks who need to know what these do can still find the docs, but
that information can be kept out of the direct path of new users so they
can focus on learning about remote backends instead.
This is certainly not the most ideal thing ever, but it seemed like the
best compromise between the competing priorities I described above.
The traversal value is normally a valid HCL string, but can be
simplified if a traversal step has a complex index value (e.g. an
object). This means it is not always parseable HCL, so this commit
updates the documentation to clarify this and explicitly record that we
do not guarantee its contents are stable. The purpose of these values is
purely for building human-readable UI.
In line with the other complex JSON output formats for plan and provider
schema, here we add an explicit `format_version` field to the JSON
output of terraform validate.
Fixes#27506
Add a new flag `-lockfile=readonly` to `terraform init`.
It would be useful to allow us to suppress dependency lockfile changes
explicitly.
The type of the `-lockfile` flag is string rather than bool, leaving
room for future extensions to other behavior variants.
The readonly mode suppresses lockfile changes, but should verify
checksums against the information already recorded. It should conflict
with the `-upgrade` flag.
Note: In the original use-case described in #27506, I would like to
suppress adding zh hashes, but a test code here suppresses adding h1
hashes because it's easy for testing.
Co-authored-by: Alisdair McDiarmid <alisdair@users.noreply.github.com>
Since this is still at an early phase and likely to change significantly
in future iterations, rather than attempting to guess on a suitable final
location for documenting the testing feature I've instead taken the
unusual approach of adding a new page that is explicitly about the
experiment. My expectation is that once we conclude the experiment we'll
replace this new page with a stub that just explains that there was once
an experiment and then links to whatever final feature unfolded from the
research.
The URL for this page is hard-coded into the warning message in the
"terraform test" command, so as we continue to evolve this feature in
future releases we'll need to update the callout note on the page about
which Terraform CLI version it's currently talking about, so users of
older versions can clearly see when they'd need to upgrade in order to
participate in a later incarnation of the experiment.
To make the command arguments easier to understand and extend, we are
moving away from positional arguments. This commit changes the graph
command to take a `-plan` flag instead of an optional trailing path.
