The previous version of this document was produced in haste in order to
support the development of the new provider framework, and so it focused
only on the most important details and left some of the operations totally
unmentioned.
This new version aims to capture the full set of managed-resource-related
provider operations, documenting when Terraform Core will call them and
what the provider ought to do in order to meet Terraform Core's
expectations for a valid response.
This new version does still assume a certain amount of knowledge on the
part of the reader about broadly what Terraform does from a user
perspective and what role providers play in that process. Perhaps a future
revision will include some additional background context as well, but
this is a snapshot of what I had time to do today between other work and
so for now I focused on presenting the remaining operations in a similar
amount of detail to what was here before.
Update the full-replacement example graph to show the transitive
dependency that is required for the destroy-then-update case. Add
another example describing the case where we reduce the graph to
only an update and replace and the dependency on the destroy node
remains.
For a while now we've been gathering some codebase-level docs that felt
out-of-place on the main Terraform website (since they are about the
implementation, not usage) but we had no existing suitable place to put
them.
In order to make this information more available (and, hopefully, more
likely to stay up-to-date as we change things), here we'll establish the
"docs" directory as a place to keep documentation aimed at those who are
working on code changes to the Terraform Core codebase.
User-oriented docs should never appear in this directory. The Terraform
website is always the better place for those. The set of docs here is
rudimentary to start and we'll see if it makes sense to expand and
reorganize it over time based on the experience with having these initial
docs available.
