The -var command line option comes with the disadvantage that a user must
contend both with Terraform's own parser and with the parser in whichever
shell they've decided to use, and different shells on different platforms
have different rules.
Previously we've largely just assumed that folks know the appropriate
syntax for the shell they chose, but it seems that command lines involving
spaces and other special characters arise rarely enough in other commands
that Terraform is often the first time someone needs to learn the
appropriate syntax for their shell.
We can't possibly capture all of the details of all shells in our docs,
because that's far outside of our own scope, but hopefully this new
section will go some way to give some real examples that will help folks
figure out how to write suitable escape sequences, if they choose to
set complex variable values on the command line rather than in .tfvars
as we recommend elsewhere on this page.
Seems like we lost a newline in some of the shuffling it took to get this
into the live website, and so it's formatting oddly in the rendered
website. This restores the intended formatting of this as the start of
a bullet list, rather than as a continuation of the previous paragraph.
* clarify input variables opening sentence
* adjust variables description
* claraify providers text and add learn callout
* add description to providers page
* add desscription and clarify provider configuration
* add deprecation note to versions in proivder configs
* add hands on callout and clarify next steps in intro
* link to language collection from language docs
* give more context about configurtion language up front
* clarify output top page
* reorganize for each intro to present feature before notes
* move description before link out and remove passive voice
* fix typo
* clarify purpose of plan
* move explanation before learn link and fully spell boolean
* add a syntax heading to separate intro from details
* add learn callout to module source docs
* clean up intro to provider requirements and add link
* Apply suggestions from code review
Co-authored-by: Tu Nguyen <im2nguyen@users.noreply.github.com>
* Apply suggestions from code review
Co-authored-by: Tu Nguyen <im2nguyen@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Tu Nguyen <im2nguyen@users.noreply.github.com>
Our module installer has a somewhat-informal idea of a "module package",
which is some external thing we can go fetch in order to add one or more
modules to the current configuration. Our documentation doesn't talk much
about it because most users seem to have found the distinction between
external and local modules pretty intuitive without us throwing a lot of
funny terminology at them, but there are some situations where the
distinction between a module and a module package are material to the
end-user.
One such situation is when using an absolute rather than relative
filesystem path: we treat that as an external package in order to make the
resulting working directory theoretically "portable" (although users can
do various other things to defeat that), and so Terraform will copy the
directory into .terraform/modules in the same way as it would download and
extract a remote archive package or clone a git repository.
A consequence of this, though, is that any relative paths called from
inside a module loaded from an absolute path will fail if they try to
traverse upward into the parent directory, because at runtime we're
actually running from a copy of the directory that's been taking out of
its original context.
A similar sort of situation can occur in a truly remote module package if
the author accidentally writes a "../" source path that traverses up out
of the package root, and so this commit introduces a special error message
for both situations that tries to be a bit clearer about there being a
package boundary and use that to explain why installation failed.
We would ideally have made escaping local references like that illegal in
the first place, but sadly we did not and so when we rebuilt the module
installer for Terraform v0.12 we ended up keeping the previous behavior of
just trying it and letting it succeed if there happened to somehow be a
matching directory at the given path, in order to remain compatible with
situations that had worked by coincidence rather than intention. For that
same reason, I've implemented this as a replacement error message we will
return only if local module installation was going to fail anyway, and
thus it only modifies the error message for some existing error situations
rather than introducing new error situations.
This also includes some light updates to the documentation to say a little
more about how Terraform treats absolute paths, though aiming not to get
too much into the weeds about module packages since it's something that
most users can get away with never knowing.
