Question: `terraform apply` and co.

[wingsofovnia]

I recently started using the rules and it came in handy for linting and formatting. I was wondering if there are any plans to support terraform init / apply?

[yanndegat]

hi @wingsofovnia

no any current plan.

In fact, it's been around 5 years now that i've started using bazel professionally to manage my terraform monorepos
with success for lint/validate/fmt/...

but all the tests i've made to try to use bazel to apply plans have been dead ends. it feels like it's not a good idea in the end.
anyway we've ended up in using flux + tf controller to auto apply our plans on merged PRs, which made this feature obsolete for my workflow.

the hardest issue to tackle is how to manage modules/root-modules and workspaces + variables per workspaces.

the setup we've ended up is

• produce module
• use hieradata (from puppet, but using a golang rewrite) to manage variables
  cf: https://github.com/yanndegat/rules_hiera
• produce tarball or oci artifacts per workspace which includes vars+modules ready to be applied by our CICD system, either by flux-tf-controller or by wrapper helping tools such a terragrunt

[ryanli]

Hi @yanndegat, What do you think of providing the prebuilt TF binary as part of rules_tf (similar to https://github.com/keith/buildifier-prebuilt) such that for those of us still using terraform apply, we at least have control over the Terraform version? One can then create an alias and do bazel run //:terraform -- apply with the same version as specified in the toolchain.

[yanndegat]

hi @ryanli

thanks for the suggestion.

i have to be honest with you: i see a lot of value in bazel and i started using it in various project for many things.
but i really struggle understanding the "correct way" to write rules and i don't even want to talk about toolchains ;)

i'm pretty sure that anyone from the bazel core team who would deep review this rulesset would be horrified by the way this is implemented here.

So, that said, i think that your suggestion is totally legit and it would be great. but i just don't know how to do it ;)

if ever i can find some sparetime, i could have a look at it. Meanwhile, if you know how to do it or want to give it a try.
feel free. you'e more than welcome !

thanks again.

regards

yann

[ryanli]

Thanks yann, I've opened #13 which exposes this (I'm already using this in my repos with a patch).