• Paddy's avatar
    command: Unmanaged providers · 5127f1ef
    Paddy authored
    This adds supports for "unmanaged" providers, or providers with process
    lifecycles not controlled by Terraform. These providers are assumed to
    be started before Terraform is launched, and are assumed to shut
    themselves down after Terraform has finished running.
    
    To do this, we must update the go-plugin dependency to v1.3.0, which
    added support for the "test mode" plugin serving that powers all this.
    
    As a side-effect of not needing to manage the process lifecycle anymore,
    Terraform also no longer needs to worry about the provider's binary, as
    it won't be used for anything anymore. Because of this, we can disable
    the init behavior that concerns itself with downloading that provider's
    binary, checking its version, and otherwise managing the binary.
    
    This is all managed on a per-provider basis, so managed providers that
    Terraform downloads, starts, and stops can be used in the same commands
    as unmanaged providers. The TF_REATTACH_PROVIDERS environment variable
    is added, and is a JSON encoding of the provider's address to the
    information we need to connect to it.
    
    This change enables two benefits: first, delve and other debuggers can
    now be attached to provider server processes, and Terraform can connect.
    This allows for attaching debuggers to provider processes, which before
    was difficult to impossible. Second, it allows the SDK test framework to
    host the provider in the same process as the test driver, while running
    a production Terraform binary against the provider. This allows for Go's
    built-in race detector and test coverage tooling to work as expected in
    provider tests.
    
    Unmanaged providers are expected to work in the exact same way as
    managed providers, with one caveat: Terraform kills provider processes
    and restarts them once per graph walk, meaning multiple times during
    most Terraform CLI commands. As unmanaged providers can't be killed by
    Terraform, and have no visibility into graph walks, unmanaged providers
    are likely to have differences in how their global mutable state behaves
    when compared to managed providers. Namely, unmanaged providers are
    likely to retain global state when managed providers would have reset
    it. Developers relying on global state should be aware of this.
    5127f1ef