Terrasonnet - Tanka-like implementation for Terraform

[ghostsquad]

@sh0rez - I've been working with Jsonnet, generating terraform/hcl code (as json), and I was thinking of writing a tool, like Tanka. I've already come up with a name: terrasonnet. I was wondering if this is something with which you'd be interested in collaborating with me. I'd like it to have feature parity with terragrunt as well.

[Duologic]

Hey @ghostsquad

Within Grafana Labs, we're exploring new ways to leverage Terraform too. Initially I would like to come up with a good way to render Jsonnet into JSON/HCL.

I've experimented a little bit here: https://github.com/jsonnet-libs/k8s/blob/master/jsonnet/terraform.jsonnet
Also @jdbaldry has experimented in this area with https://github.com/jdbaldry/tfsonnet

Do you have any experiments going perhaps?

[ghostsquad]

I'll put together an example and share it.

[tskinn]

@ghostsquad If you start a project I would be more than happy to try and contribute. I've been looking for something like this.

[ghostsquad]

Jsonnet, even Terraform continue to be problematic. I came to realize that jsonnet on top of HCL was just more problematic. Now you needed to know 2 languages, how they interact, and when to do something in jsonnet vs in HCL.

I've begun to look at Pulumi instead. If I'm forced to use Terraform, I may continue down this path. Otherwise, Pulumi, the Pulumi K8s Operator, etc look really promising.

Terrasonnet feels like a future ksonnet. A dead end.

I think jsonnet is still quite awesome though, and do wish that language can grow, but I'm skeptical of that too.

I'm still up to show some code though if folks are still interested.

[tskinn]

Yeah, after I wrote this I spent some time experimenting again and ran into some familiar problems. I think I agree with you. Dead end.

[Duologic]

I'm currently implementing Crossplane, it has the potential to solve a few of the problems we face with Terraform. We have a generated jsonnet library for creating Crossplane objects here: https://jsonnet-libs.github.io/crossplane-libsonnet/

[frimik]

I’m using terramate for all my dynamic and code generation needs for terraform now.

The way I tie terraform Tanka (jsonnet) together now is I read from terraform variable files both from Terraform and in Jsonnet.

I use terraform.tfvars.json anywhere I want to also use the same data in Jsonnet.

Then I have certain Terraform stacks which generate /lib/terraform-data/…/config.json files which also gets added and committed to the source repo which also can be read in by Jsonnet in the CI pipeline. This is not so much to strictly fully automate, but to primarily single source data and to eliminate human factors which otherwise may lead to copy-paste errors or configuration drift.

[ghostsquad]

This sounds very similar to what I've done. Personally I haven't had many issues with code generation, but folks I've worked with haven't been as receptive for a variety of reasons.

I wish Jsonnet was easier to debug. That seems like the biggest issue. The errors and stack traces are seldom helpful.

Seems years later, Jsonnet is still not advancing at any reasonable pace. I think I've stopped caring about solving problems like this. Developers don't want to trade a higher cognitive burden for the flexibility that Jsonnet and code generation provides.

[Duologic]

This project seems to be quite active on this topic: https://docs.tflibsonnet.com/