"Failed to read state plan" during acc tests using terraform-plugin-test

[kmoe]

The following issue appears in terraform-provider-kubernetes-alpha, which uses the archived terraform-plugin-test repo. It is not yet known whether this issue is reproducible with the SDKv2 plugintest package.

The following acceptance test run fails with an error:

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-kubernetes-alpha/runs/2345992263

customresourcedefinition_test.go:41: failed to read state plan: invalid character 'c' looking for beginning of value

The failed to read state plan error text comes from RequireState() in terraform-plugin-test, which calls tf.Show(). This runs the terraform show -json command and attempts to deserialise the resultant JSON, which seems to have failed due to the command output not being valid JSON.

[kmoe]

We need to look into whether github.com/hashicorp/setup-terraform, used to install Terraform to the PATH in GitHub Actions steps, causes issues if terraform_wrapper is not set to false. I suspect there may be some issues with tfexec/reattach/binary testing if the wrapper is used.

Is the invalid character 'c' error caused by the setup-terraform wrapper outputting command not found?

[phillbaker]

I came across this issue when upgrading a separate provider that uses github actions. It looks like the default ubuntu image used by github actions has already upgraded to terraform 1.x, in my case, I needed to use hashicorp/setup-terraform to install a version less than 1.x for the tests to run.

[bflad]

@phillbaker do very recent versions of Terraform CLI work if you upgrade terraform-plugin-sdk to version 2.7.0? The terraform-exec 0.14.0 upgrade was specifically for supporting for Terraform CLI 1.0.1 and later.

[phillbaker]

I'll take a look, thanks for the hint @bflad. I was trying to avoid debugging too many things by jumping from SDK 1.x to a much higher 2.x, but that changelog certainly looks relevant 😀 .

[bflad]

Hey @kmoe 👋 Indeed when using hashicorp/setup-terraform in GitHub Actions, terraform_wrapper must be explicitly disabled at the moment. It is very likely that the next major version of that GitHub Action will no longer require that input, since it has been very confusing for practitioners expecting Terraform CLI to "just work like normal" after the installation. (The wrapper does have its own benefits so it'd likely just be flipping the default, or potentially splitting the action into separate install and optional "enhanced use case" actions.)

Relatedly, the acceptance testing documentation was very recently enhanced with GitHub Actions Workflow instructions, so hopefully developers can use that information to correctly test providers using the acceptance testing framework. 👍

[github-actions]

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