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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.
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Terraform Core Codebase Documentation
This directory contains some documentation about the Terraform Core codebase, aimed at readers who are interested in making code contributions.
If you're looking for information on using Terraform, please instead refer to the main Terraform CLI documentation.
Terraform Core Architecture Documents
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Terraform Core Architecture Summary: an overview of the main components of Terraform Core and how they interact. This is the best starting point if you are diving in to this codebase for the first time.
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Resource Instance Change Lifecycle: a description of the steps in validating, planning, and applying a change to a resource instance, from the perspective of the provider plugin RPC operations. This may be useful for understanding the various expectations Terraform enforces about provider behavior, either if you intend to make changes to those behaviors or if you are implementing a new Terraform plugin SDK and so wish to conform to them.
(If you are planning to write a new provider using the official SDK then please refer to the Extend documentation instead; it presents similar information from the perspective of the SDK API, rather than the plugin wire protocol.)
Contribution Guides
- Maintainer Etiquette: guidelines and expectations for those who serve as Pull Request reviewers, issue triagers, etc.