Support for latest:^0.12

[merajshaikh]

Hi everyone,
i have .terrform-version file which says "latest:^0.12"
which is not supported directly and I have to manually shift to the 0.12.31 version
does anyone know how can I work with this?

I can't change this to 0.12.31 as my ci/cd pipeline uses tfenv and complains about this and says it should be now formatted like this "latest:^0.12"
ERROR: Pinned terraform version needs to be in the format 'latest:^',
e.g. 'latest:^0.12'.

[warrensbox]

Hi @merajshaikh I am not sure if I am following.
tfenv and tfswitch are two different tools. They use different formats.
For CICD, please refer to this:
https://tfswitch.warrensbox.com/Continuous-Integration/

[yermulnik]

"latest:^0.12"

By any chance what this notation means in terms of TF version? Latest in 0.12 branch (0.12.31) or something else?

[merajshaikh]

Hi @yermulnik @warrensbox
Yeah I was new to using tfenv and tfswitch on that time so i got confuesd

So tfenv has this support of latest:^0.12
which means 0.12 but the latest version which would be 0.12.31

Can we add this to tfswitch please?

[yermulnik]

Well, what you're asking for is actually to implement support for tfenv-specific syntax with tfenv-specific file (.terraform-version) which falls apart the HCL version constraint syntax in latest:<regex> part. Thus I, frankly speaking, see no sense in implementing cross-tools support to this extent (where the latest:<regex> syntax is specific to tfenv only and is not supported by Terraform as such).

I'd recommend to not try and mix different tools though and switch to using either but not both.
I also would recommend to rely upon the required_version from TF configuration files to allow both Terraform and 3rd-party tools like tfswutch and tfenv to align on the version of Terraform required. Going this path you can set required_version to "~> 0.12" in Terraform configuration and tfswitch and allegedly tfenv will pick that constraint up and use the latest available version of Terraform.

See https://tfswitch.warrensbox.com/Quick-Start/ for more details on usage, features and options.

[merajshaikh]

Ohh got it and I agree
thanks for the detailed info

I just have 1 more question regarding the precedence how can I give precedence to version.tf(required_version) over .terraform-version for my tfswitch install?

as to tfswitch currently has precedenc to .terraform-version and then rest
i can't delete or remove it as other members and ci/cd are using tfenv
it is only m1 users (me) who are using tfswitch

[yermulnik]

I just have 1 more question regarding the precedence how can I give precedence to version.tf(required_version) over .terraform-version for my tfswitch install?

Oh, apologies, I indeed missed precedence bit...
The .tfswitchrc has precedence over .terraform-version, but it doesn't support version constraints 😞
It seems like you're stuck at the moment unless your team drops the .terraform-version file and switches to rely upon required_version (from what I see tfenv supports that: https://github.com/tfutils/tfenv#min-required--latest-allowed).

The other option is a quirk and is somewhat that @warrensbox suggested above: create a tfswitch shell alias that would do something like [ -f ".terraform-version" ] && rm ".terraform-version" && { tfswitch; git checkout -- ".terraform-version"; } (I assumed you use Git).