terraform.tfvars (and CLI vars ignored)

[serenitus]

On master (35352a2):

I simply cannot get the following to work:

terraform.tfvars

environment_name = "Development"

test.tf

provider "aws" {
    access_key = "foo"
    secret_key = "bar"
    region = "us-west-1"
}

resource "aws_vpc" "VPC" {
    cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"
    tags {
        Name = "${var.environment_name}"
    }
}

This results in:

There are warnings and/or errors related to your configuration. Please
fix these before continuing.

Errors:

• module root: 1 error(s) occurred:
• resource 'aws_vpc.VPC' config: unknown variable referenced: environment_name

Manually:

$ terraform plan -var 'environment_name=Development'

Results in exactly the same error. As does:

$ terraform plan -var-file=terraform.tfvars

[pmoust]

You have to declare environment_name in *.tf , tfvars assigns a value to a variable, it does not declare the variable, same goes with the the variable value assigning from cli.

variable "environment_name" {}

[serenitus]

Haha. I totally am a giant clownshoe today. Thanks! :)

[chiefy]

Not sure if I was being a clownshoe, or if it's not intuitive, but I just spent a while trying to figure out why my tfvars file wasn't working. I am a n00b coming from the packer workflow where you template with straight up JSON files. Oh well, thanks for this though, it helped.

[jbarreneche]

Same here, bumped with the same problem.
I think the problem is the documentation. It doesn't say anywhere that for *.tfvars files to have any effect the variable needs to be declared in a *.tf (and it's not something intuitive, the files are tfvars).

[ghost]

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