[REQUEST] Terraform Enterprise backend support

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. It appears that runway only supports terraform backends of type s3, currently. My organization has acquired Terraform Enterprise, and we are working on migrating our Terraform state storage from S3 to Terraform Enterprise. Since we heavily use runway, this lack of support is causing us trouble.

Describe the solution you’d like I’ve thought of a few potential solutions to this problem:

• Update the terraform_backend_config property (and the backend config file feature) to support remote backend properties.
• Another potential solution could be providing the option to skip terraform init. I don’t think this is inline with the mission of runway, but I’m guessing it would be a quicker/easier change.
• Update the terraform backend configuration syntax to be more like that of terragrunt. If, instead of using backend[-*].tfvars files, runway used a templatized backend[-*].hcl file, this feature request likely wouldn’t be required and further flux in the backend space wouldn’t require rework and runway (disclaimer: I assume this is the case, as I’ve not done a deep dive on this area of the runway codebase)
• Add support for terragrunt as a module type that runway can deploy.

Describe alternatives you’ve considered A few things I’ve tried to get around this limitation:

• Passing a backend-config arg to terraform (despite the warning in the docs)
• Adding a backend[-*].tfvars file with the best guesses at appropriate variable names
• Running terraform init for terraform modules before running runway deploy

[ITProKyle]

PRs are always welcome for bug fixes, planned/approved features, etc.

For this one, it may be better to let me take care of it. I have a few thoughts on removing restrictions on values passed to terraform_backend_config to open it up for future needs rather than just supporting the remote backend.

The other items I will likely turn into toggleable options to allow their use at the users discretion.

I should be able to start on this later today and will let you know when I have a usable build if you would like to beta test it.

[ITProKyle]

updated https://github.com/ITProKyle/terraform-cloud-test to include example uses of both workspaces.name and workspaces.prefix. I also update the lock file to reference a new commit that should now autodetect when a remote backend is being used and deal with it appropriately depending on the use of name or prefix.

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through a bit of digging, I was able to find this issue: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/issues/21830. It would appear that not being able to specify workspaces is a bug in v0.12 - it had worked in v0.11. The issue has been open for over a year at this point so theres no telling if it will be fixed but hopefully it will be fixed for v0.13.

I’m not sure if adding support for providing it as a CLI argument for v0.11 only is worth while but I can do it if it would be useful.