Terraform Commands fail when no provider version is specified

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cdktf & Language Versions

all

Affected Resource(s)

Provider requirements

Debug Output

$(yarn bin)/cdktf diff
⠸ initializing typescript-vault...

Error: Invalid provider version constraint

Invalid version constraint "undefined" for provider vault.

Error: Invalid version constraint

  on cdk.tf.json line 10, in terraform.required_providers:
  10:       "vault": "undefined"

This string does not use correct version constraint syntax.

non-zero exit code 1

Expected Behavior

When specifying a cdktf.json file like this:

{
  "language": "typescript",
  "app": "npm run --silent compile && node main.js",
  "terraformProviders": [
    "vault"
  ]
}

I’d expect it to work properly for all cli comands.

Actual Behavior

diff / deploy / destroy are broken

Steps to Reproduce

• Specify cdktf.json file as described above
• run cdktf get
• run cdktf diff

[PacoVK]

@danieldreier in fact your proposal in #877 will help a lot and i agree to your points. Basically this is what i also suggested but as an extension to the existing cdk get. However having an install command and getting rid of manually editing cdktf.jsonis a more elegant way IMHO.

[danieldreier]

It’s unclear to me whether users (please chime in!) actively oppose dependency pinning, but my impulse here is to see this as a UX problem resulting from us requiring users to manually edit cdktf.json to specify providers.

Based on my experience in Terraform Core, using providers that aren’t pinned to at least a general range basically inevitably (eventually) results in an unplanned pain when a backwards-incompatible provider release happens.

I’m inclined to fix this with a UX more like what I proposed in https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk/issues/877 and avoid users needing to edit cdktf.json under normal circumstances. Alternatively, we could rely on the Terraform dependency lock file but I think we’re signing people up for a problem down the road if we equate a missing version string to latest.