Document that provider versions must be pinned in 0.12.31

[deniseyu]

Terraform Version

0.12.31, likely all 0.12 patch versions

Affected Pages

https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cli/v1.1.x/run

What is the docs issue?

An issue was reported in hashicorp/terraform-provider-random#663 where Terraform 0.12.31 pulled the latest pre-release version of the terraform-random-provider, breaking configuration. This is a known bug in 0.12 where prerelease versions are not correctly parsed for compatibility checks.

Proposal

While we continue to investigate ways to mitigate the impact to end users, we should at least put a notice on existing <1.1 documentation pages to advise practitioners who are on pre-1.0 versions to pin their provider versions, if they can't upgrade for whatever reason. (of course upgrading would be better!)

Maybe this page, but no strong opinions about where this goes:
https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cli/v1.1.x/run

References

No response

[jbardin]

This may affect later versions too, it's hard to test since the registry has never returned prereleases for providers. The listed go-version package had been patched at that point, so we would need to figure out when what constituted "latest" was changed. Though as far as docs go, the 0.12 upgrade tool automatically added constrains for users, and any provider documentation has always specified a reasonable constraint, so it's not like this wasn't already emphasized at the time of 0.12.

[bbasata]

This may affect later versions too

Conveniently: the latest published release of cloudinit is a pre-release; it's much smaller in number of downloads and has no reported issues at the moment, so it can be a useful test case for a limited window of time.

I've run an Action that attempts to install cloudinit with no version constraint across Terraform 0.12 - 1.11.0. Initial finding: Terraform 0.13 correctly installed terraform-provider-cloudinit 2.3.5, which is the latest patch release. I have not inspected all the output yet (internal repo).