Terraform Version Restrictions

One of my favourite forthcoming Terraform 0.8 features is the ability to restrict the versions of terraform a configuration file can be run by. Terraform is a rapidly moving project that constantly introduces new functionality and providers and unless you’re careful and read the change logs, and ensure everyone is running the same minor version (or you run terraform from a central point like Jenkins), you can easily find yourself getting large screens of errors from using a resource that’s in terraform master but not the version you’re running locally.

The new terraform configuration block allows you to avoid these kinds of issues by explicitly declaring which versions your code requires -

    $ cat resources/my_resources.tf

    terraform {
        required_version = "> 0.8.3"
        # or specify a lower and upper bound
        # required_version = "> 0.7.0, < 0.8.0"
    }

    $ ./terraform-8 plan resources

    The currently running version of Terraform doesn't meet the
    version requirements explicitly specified by the configuration.
    Please use the required version or update the configuration.
    Note that version requirements are usually set for a reason, so
    we recommend verifying with whoever set the version requirements
    prior to making any manual changes.

    Module: root
    Required version: > 0.8.3
    Current version: 0.8.0

While it’s not a shiny new piece of functionality I think this change will be greatly welcomed by terraform module authors. It shows a further step in maturity of both the tool and its emerging ecosystem and I can’t wait for it to become widely adopted.