Back end gives an extremely unhelpful error message when it can't find the credentials

[jkugler]

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Description

My main.tf looked like this:

terraform {
  # Here we configure the providers we need to run our configuration
  required_providers {
    google = {
      source  = "hashicorp/google"
      version = "3.86.0"
    }
  }

  # With this backend configuration we are telling Terraform that the
  # created state should be saved in some Google Cloud Bucket with some prefix
  backend "gcs" {
    bucket      = "my-project-state"
    prefix      = "terraform/state"
    credentials = "my-project.json"
  }
}

When I tried terraform init, I got:

Initializing the backend...
╷
│ Error: storage.NewClient() failed: dialing: invalid character 'm' looking for beginning of value

I finally figured out I hadn't copied my-project.json into the current directory. Once I did, terraform init worked. That was a very unhelpful error message. :)

New or Affected Resource(s)

This is Terraform 1.0.8 with Google provider 3.86.0

[nat-henderson]

Wow, that is a difficult-to-parse error message. Sorry about that! Unfortunately I believe the GCS backend is not part of this project and this issue should be handled by Terraform Core, since it's a "standard backend". @megan07, should we leave the issue open here, or are we better off to close it and reopen in core?

[megan07]

We can leave it open here and I'll take a look at it!

[github-actions]

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