Autoload *.tfvars in the same way as *.tf (allow inheritance)

[radeksimko]

There's currently just one static file - terraform.tfvars where user can place custom settings, but I was thinking that there might be need for more versions of this file, e.g. per environment or per user who's executing it.

The idea is to load all *.tfvars alphabetically, so that user can have e.g. 01-user.tfvars in .gitignore and keep 00-default.tfvars in the repository.

This would generally allow inheritance between these files.

[mitchellh]

This is actually a pretty decent idea. Not sure why we made it terraform.tfvars specifically. I'll think about it. Thoughts, @phinze ?

[derek-adair]

+1

[phinze]

Yeah I'm +1 for this as well. We'll need to spec and document the behavior on collisions, and we may also want to provide some UX to inspect variables.

We'll need to think about if we're ever going to support complex types (lists, mappings) as input variables. If so, we'll have to consider the inheritance behavior for those types.

[mitchellh]

@phinze I think as an early implementation, any later file just overrides the earlier. We can define more complex types in the future. But I think the easiest will just be that top-level keys just override earlier top-level keys.

[mitchellh]

@phinze More reasons why this makes sense initially: we support multiple -var-file flags. I think wes hould just treat it as if the person just appended those on there.

[phinze]

Oh yeah - initial impl should be easy then. 👍

[chrisferry]

👍

[radeksimko]

I plan to look at the implementation, just wanted to ask for feedback regarding this:

Shall we ignore any *.tfvars starting with dot (.) as that's a common behaviour in Unix and more importantly it could be useful in certain situations?

I currently do have a very simple script that takes a "tfvars template" and fills in some known variables, typically external IP address taken via curl http://ipinfo.io/ip and I obviously want to prevent such template from autoloading as it's only template. If I don't take the template and don't generate anything, I still want to leverage the nice TF feature of interactive prompt.

I don't mind sticking to any different convention, but I was thinking that .terraform.template.tfvars could be a nice one?

[mitchellh]

@radeksimko I think we should ignore any files in the same way we ignore *.tf files. There is a isTemporaryFile non-exported helper in config package. I think we should perhaps make that public, add to that one thing over time, and use that to figure out what to ignore and what not to ignore. That way what is ignored for tf is uniform with `tfvars.

[matti]

Is this still on the roadmap?

[ghost]

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