Historically the responsibility for making sure that all of the available
providers are of suitable versions and match the appropriate checksums has
been split rather inexplicably over multiple different layers, with some
of the checks happening as late as creating a terraform.Context.
We're gradually iterating towards making that all be handled in one place,
but in this step we're just cleaning up some old remnants from the
main "terraform" package, which is now no longer responsible for any
version or checksum verification and instead just assumes it's been
provided with suitable factory functions by its caller.
We do still have a pre-check here to make sure that we at least have a
factory function for each plugin the configuration seems to depend on,
because if we don't do that up front then it ends up getting caught
instead deep inside the Terraform runtime, often inside a concurrent
graph walk and thus it's not deterministic which codepath will happen to
catch it on a particular run.
As of this commit, this actually does leave some holes in our checks: the
command package is using the dependency lock file to make sure we have
exactly the provider packages we expect (exact versions and checksums),
which is the most crucial part, but we don't yet have any spot where
we make sure that the lock file is consistent with the current
configuration, and we are no longer preserving the provider checksums as
part of a saved plan.
Both of those will come in subsequent commits. While it's unusual to have
a series of commits that briefly subtracts functionality and then adds
back in equivalent functionality later, the lock file checking is the only
part that's crucial for security reasons, with everything else mainly just
being to give better feedback when folks seem to be using Terraform
incorrectly. The other bits are therefore mostly cosmetic and okay to be
absent briefly as we work towards a better design that is clearer about
where that responsibility belongs.
Previously our graph walker expected to recieve a data structure
containing schemas for all of the provider and provisioner plugins used in
the configuration and state. That made sense back when
terraform.NewContext was responsible for loading all of the schemas before
taking any other action, but it no longer has that responsiblity.
Instead, we'll now make sure that the "contextPlugins" object reaches all
of the locations where we need schema -- many of which already had access
to that object anyway -- and then load the needed schemas just in time.
The contextPlugins object memoizes schema lookups, so we can safely call
it many times with the same provider address or provisioner type name and
know that it'll still only load each distinct plugin once per Context
object.
As of this commit, the Context.Schemas method is now a public interface
only and not used by logic in the "terraform" package at all. However,
that does leave us in a rather tenuous situation of relying on the fact
that all practical users of terraform.Context end up calling "Schemas" at
some point in order to verify that we have all of the expected versions
of plugins. That's a non-obvious implicit dependency, and so in subsequent
commits we'll gradually move all responsibility for verifying plugin
versions into the caller of terraform.NewContext, which'll heal a
long-standing architectural wart whereby the caller is responsible for
installing and locating the plugin executables but not for verifying that
what's installed is conforming to the current configuration and dependency
lock file.
Previously the graph builders all expected to be given a full manifest
of all of the plugin component schemas that they could need during their
analysis work. That made sense when terraform.NewContext would always
proactively load all of the schemas before doing any other work, but we
now have a load-as-needed strategy for schemas.
We'll now have the graph builders use the contextPlugins object they each
already hold to retrieve individual schemas when needed. This avoids the
need to prepare a redundant data structure to pass alongside the
contextPlugins object, and leans on the memoization behavior inside
contextPlugins to preserve the old behavior of loading each provider's
schema only once.
In the v0.12 timeframe we made contextComponentFactory an interface with
the expectation that we'd write mocks of it for tests, but in practice we
ended up just always using the same "basicComponentFactory" implementation
throughout.
In the interests of simplification then, here we replace that interface
and its sole implementation with a new concrete struct type
contextPlugins.
Along with the general benefit that this removes an unneeded indirection,
this also means that we can add additional methods to the struct type
without the usual restriction that interface types prefer to be small.
In particular, in a future commit I'm planning to add methods for loading
provider and provisioner schemas, working with the currently-unused new
fields this commit has included in contextPlugins, as compared to its
predecessor basicComponentFactory.
Previously terraform.Context was built in an unfortunate way where all of
the data was provided up front in terraform.NewContext and then mutated
directly by subsequent operations. That made the data flow hard to follow,
commonly leading to bugs, and also meant that we were forced to take
various actions too early in terraform.NewContext, rather than waiting
until a more appropriate time during an operation.
This (enormous) commit changes terraform.Context so that its fields are
broadly just unchanging data about the execution context (current
workspace name, available plugins, etc) whereas the main data Terraform
works with arrives via individual method arguments and is returned in
return values.
Specifically, this means that terraform.Context no longer "has-a" config,
state, and "planned changes", instead holding on to those only temporarily
during an operation. The caller is responsible for propagating the outcome
of one step into the next step so that the data flow between operations is
actually visible.
However, since that's a change to the main entry points in the "terraform"
package, this commit also touches every file in the codebase which
interacted with those APIs. Most of the noise here is in updating tests
to take the same actions using the new API style, but this also affects
the main-code callers in the backends and in the command package.
My goal here was to refactor without changing observable behavior, but in
practice there are a couple externally-visible behavior variations here
that seemed okay in service of the broader goal:
- The "terraform graph" command is no longer hooked directly into the
core graph builders, because that's no longer part of the public API.
However, I did include a couple new Context functions whose contract
is to produce a UI-oriented graph, and _for now_ those continue to
return the physical graph we use for those operations. There's no
exported API for generating the "validate" and "eval" graphs, because
neither is particularly interesting in its own right, and so
"terraform graph" no longer supports those graph types.
- terraform.NewContext no longer has the responsibility for collecting
all of the provider schemas up front. Instead, we wait until we need
them. However, that means that some of our error messages now have a
slightly different shape due to unwinding through a differently-shaped
call stack. As of this commit we also end up reloading the schemas
multiple times in some cases, which is functionally acceptable but
likely represents a performance regression. I intend to rework this to
use caching, but I'm saving that for a later commit because this one is
big enough already.
The proximal reason for this change is to resolve the chicken/egg problem
whereby there was previously no single point where we could apply "moved"
statements to the previous run state before creating a plan. With this
change in place, we can now do that as part of Context.Plan, prior to
forking the input state into the three separate state artifacts we use
during planning.
However, this is at least the third project in a row where the previous
API design led to piling more functionality into terraform.NewContext and
then working around the incorrect order of operations that produces, so
I intend that by paying the cost/risk of this large diff now we can in
turn reduce the cost/risk of future projects that relate to our main
workflow actions.
