Improve UX when a service account isn't used.

[MaxRenaud]

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Description

The Google provider requires the setting of an environment variable or a link to the service credentials in the provider configuration. This is true even if the user has gcloud installed and is logged in via "gcloud auth login". When attempting to apply a plan, the user is redirected to this website to create a service account:
https://cloud.google.com/docs/authentication/production
That website is a bit heavy for our use case and greets the visitor with code in 7 programming languages.

The provider documentation reference located at:
https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/google/guides/provider_reference.html#credentials
marks the credentials as optional so it's not unreasonable to assume that a user authenticated with the gcloud CLI would use these credentials by default.

As it turns out, the quickest way to get started is to run this:
gcloud auth application-default login
then export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS to point to the newly created json file.

While creating SA is best practices, we should give the user the option to apply the plan as their currently logged-in user. This adds values for prototyping and debugging.

I propose the following:

1. Add the "gcloud auth application-default login" command tip to the "could not find default credentials" error message. That way, the quick fix for the error is right in the error message.
2. When no credentials are supplied, default to the default output location for "gcloud auth application-default login". On linux, it is ~/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json

That way someone trying a tutorial or just playing around with the provider will be able to quickly get started.

New or Affected Resource(s)

• google (provider)

Potential Terraform Configuration

N/A

References

N/A

[nat-henderson]

Thanks! Added this message in a few places that someone playing around is likely to find, as well as in the main error message they are likely to see.

Fortunately, the second suggestion, to use the default output location, is already incorporated - if it didn't work for you when you tried it please let me know and we can debug! But we call https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/oauth2/google#FindDefaultCredentials (via https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/oauth2/google#DefaultTokenSource), which explicitly documents that it attempts that path.

[MaxRenaud]

Thanks ndmckinley,
I tried this again and can confirm that #2 is a non-issue. Thanks for for PR.

[ghost]

I'm going to lock this issue because it has been closed for 30 days ⏳. This helps our maintainers find and focus on the active issues.

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