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Update to Terraform 12

This guide walks you through the steps you should take when upgrading your Reference Architecture deployment to Terraform 0.12.x and Terragrunt 0.19.x.

Core Concepts​

Terraform 0.12 (referred to as TF12) was released in May, 2019, and it included a few major changes:

  1. A shift from HCL to HCL2 as the main syntax. This included support for first-class expressions (i.e., using variables and functions without having to wrap everything in ${...}).
  2. Some official providers have changed their syntax. For example, the terraform_remote_state data source now requires an outputs attribute to index into the outputs exported by the state.
  3. More strict rules around what can go in a .tfvars file. In particular, any variable defined in a .tfvars file that does not match a corresponding variable definition in your .tf files produces an error.
  4. Math behave differently. In particular, many functions that previously returned ints now return floats.
  5. Bools behave differently, where they are no longer auto type casted to ints.

To be compatible with Terraform 0.12 changes, Terragrunt 0.19 (referred to as TG19) was released. Before version 0.19.0, Terragrunt had you define its configuration in a terragrunt = { ... } variable in a terraform.tfvars file, but due to item (1) this no longer works with Terraform 0.12 and newer.

To support this:

  1. Terragrunt now defines and uses its own configuration file format: terragrunt.hcl. As a result of this, all the attributes and blocks that used to be defined under the terragrunt input in the terraform.tfvars file is now defined at the top level.
  2. The terragrunt.hcl file:
    • Uses HCL2 syntax.
    • Is now more strict about the difference between blocks and attributes.
    • Supports all Terraform built-in functions in its config file.
    • Defines inputs to modules are using a new attribute (inputs).

This means that both the modules and the live config need to be updated in order to support TF12.