Process for working without Versioning in they-terraform

[xddq]

Context

We currently don't use versioning which means that breaking changes in they-terraform are escalated to our applications using they-terraform modules and they can suddenly no longer work. On the other hand, this approach has the upside that we are forced to keep our dependencies up-to-date. Also, no version management is needed. E.g. we don't have to update the versions for all our code using they-terraform modules. A downside of this approach is that (currently) updates/new commits on they-terraform only get appliead if we remove the terraform module cache locally.

Desired Outcome

• Know a way how we can work to ensure that our local environment will always have the latest version/commit of our they-terraform repo. (just a few idea/possibilites can be totally wrong/bad: tf init -with-upgrade (or similar), always remove the local cache folder before tf init, perhaps we can use 'latest' versioning and releases to force the updates..?)
• Know how we can work around the situation where we have a breaking change but don't want to update the code yet. (Perhaps we can pin commit hashes?)
• timebox max 1d

[xddq]

idea: maybe we can use .envrc to create alias from tf init to tf init -upgrade

[e2b]

• terraform init -upgrade or terraform get -upgrade is definitley required to read newest reversion from GitHub
• CLI can be configured to not use some sort off global offline cache, but this is solely for providers and apparently global cache isn't used by default anyway
• Hooks are only available in Terraform Cloud, not local CLI
• direnv (.envrc) does not support aliases: https://github.com/direnv/direnv/issues/73 There are some hacky ways in the comments that are highly shell dependent and I would not recommend.

Ideas:

• create shell alias at your own discretion alias tf init='terraform init -upgrade' but that only works globally
  • could create a shell alias calling a function that conditionally invokes adapted command or not based on current directory
  • use some dedicated tooling similar to direnv to share shell aliases, maybe something like https://swapoff.org/ondir.html
• provide local shell script instead:

  echo "terraform init -update
  exec terraform apply" > terraform-init.sh
  chmod +x terraform-init.sh
  ./terraform-init.sh

[StarfishM]

thanks for looking into this, and investigating hacky wacky workarounds @e2b I think for the time being, it's probably most feasible, that we use alias at our own discretion, it doesn't require any extra setup, other than our local shell config, personally I think setting up extra tooling is a bit much. One thought we should extend the README for they-terraform and add a little note about the necessity of using terraform init -upgrade, I don't think that's necessarily a command especially new people to tf would think of, what do you think?

[StarfishM]

closing this, as we discussed to reopen version releases for they-terraform, plus a mention in the readme about terraform init --upgrade will be made.