Terraform Weekly - Issue #13

July 02, 2020

I took last week off from writing the newsletter due to a bit of overload, but back this week with some good stuff.

Last week was Hashiconf Digital, the online replacement for Hashiconf EU. If you registered for the event, the videos are temporarily available on the event site. I am told they are going to move to youtube soon. Once they have I am going to be working through them each week and highlighting the things I find interesting. Below are a few bits from the keynote.

The beta has been out for a few weeks, but this seems to be the official announcement. The major improvements are count and for_each on modules, variable validation on modules and 3rd party providers in the registry. They covered this in the HashiConf Digital Keynote as well

The latest beta in the 0.13 series is out, full of bug fixes. If you are testing, time to download the new version and try it out.

I have to admit, I am not a Terragrunt user. Mostly because I started writing something that covers some of the same use cases before I cam across it. This is one of the first overviews I've seen that really shines a light on the value in using Terragrunt.

It seems there is a whole category of tools dedicated to doing the inverse of managing infrastructure with code ("managing code with infrastructure"?).

Former2 is the most recent I have come across and it works as a browser extension which can query resources as you browse the AWS console. There is also a CLI, but it seems quite limited.

Notable Releases

This is the latest version of the Terraform language server, which powers tools like the VS Code extension for terraform.

Walk hierarchy to add root modules (#176)

For configurations with multiple root modules (or components, or whatever you like to call them) there is now support in the language server to walk the hierarchy and find all of them. It currently requires that the component be initialized (ie .terraform exists) to be considered. Probably a decent heuristic, but certainly could cause some confusion.

Experimental support for 0.13 version (#149)

It does not appear that any 0.13 features have been added, the language server is just not going to ignore 0.13 components any more.

A pretty big release to this tool. I am going to highlight some things I find personally interesting–

tflint has a plugin architecture and this release makes a number of improvements to that mechanism. If you have a plugin you want to use, upgrade tflint-plugin-sdk to 0.2.0.

New rule: terraform_standard_module_structure rule (#801)

A new rule that enforces the the standard file structure for terraform modules.