Official support of custom User Agent Info

[nathanzanon]

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Description

The provider appears to support including custom User Agent info through the use of the environment variable TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT -- current config, also as far back as v2.0.0 (I didn't look further back).

This environment variable seems to be a defacto standard adopted by certain providers.

There is no documentation about it for the google provider(s) (or in Terraform itself), so it seems somewhat un-official.

If this is "officially" supported, could use of the TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT environment variable please be documented.

New or Affected Resource(s)

• google_*

Potential Terraform Configuration

export TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT="Build/65d6ca037bb7af1b41960551"
terraform init
terraform plan

References

• Example usage documentation in the AWS provider

[melinath]

@nathanzanon we'll have to look into this in more detail, and may consider removing this environment variable. could you elaborate on your use case? Is it already met by GOOGLE_TERRAFORM_USERAGENT_EXTENSION?

[SarahFrench]

I took a look about the origins of TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT:

• Originally in Terraform when the SDK was part of Terraform - link to when hashicorp/terraform was vendored
• In v1 of the SDK the ENV was present (docs, code) - pulled across from Terraform when the SDK was made into a separate package
• In v2 of the SDK this ENV was carried over again - see here in the docs for v2
  • The provider today uses that function from SDKv2 to set the user agent
  • The plugin framework version of that provider configuration code implements the same logic as in SDKv2 (same link as in issue description above)

This ENV has been here a long time and is currently in use for both SDK/plugin-framework parts of the provider.

[nathanzanon]

Hi @melinath,

I didn't actually know about the GOOGLE_TERRAFORM_USERAGENT_EXTENSION feature (I clearly need to RTFM ... again), I was only looking for the TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT variable that I'd seen used before.

Using GOOGLE_TERRAFORM_USERAGENT_EXTENSION would mostly satisfy our use case, noting that it appears this functionality was added in version 3.60.0.

Although TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT has the benefit that it's picked-up by Terraform and used in calls to a gcs backend, but if set for the init it has the potential downside that it's sent to registries.

@SarahFrench's investigation got me curious as to the exact releases the functionality was added. From my looking through the changelogs they don't mention them, so from my looking through history it appears:

• TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT was added in commit 5117943, which was part of 1.15.0 on 25-Jun-2018.
• GOOGLE_TERRAFORM_USERAGENT_EXTENSION was added in commit 13122c8, which was part of 3.60.0 on 15-Mar-2021.

A bit ashamed to admit we will have configs using providers older than 3.60.0, so GOOGLE_TERRAFORM_USERAGENT_EXTENSION wouldn't fully cover our usage.

[BBBmau]

From triage: we'll want to document using the newer environment variable GOOGLE_TERRAFORM_USERAGENT_EXTENSION over the older TF_APPEND_USER_AGENT variable.

Figure out how to add support for this into the GCS backend.