invoke terraform directly instead of terragrunt about terragrunt

[josh-padnick]

Hi @gregwebs!

In our blog post introducing terragrunt, under the section Why not just submit Pull Requests to Terraform?, we give the specific reasons why we wrote a separate tool versus submitting a few Pull Requests to update Terraform directly. But we also clarify that while our short-term goal with Terragrunt is to get community feedback and empower our own clients, our ultimate goal is to see this functionality implemented directly in Terraform.

[gregwebs]

It sounds like you are saying the way you want to achieve this is by merging the code into terraform. I have a feeling that may be a long way out from happening right now, but I am definitely supportive of that. I may take a stab at trying to create a data source that does locking when I get a little more concerned about locking.

[abtreece]

Some of the Terragrunt features are also features of Terraform Enterprise,
locking in particular. Thus you may find some opposition to getting them
included in Terraform.

[dmrzzz]

As an alternative lower-tech approach, how about letting terragrunt learn the location of my terraform binary from a terragrunt-specific environment variable? That way I don't have to put terraform on my PATH, which means if I accidentally type terraform instead of terragrunt it won't do anything.

[brikis98]

@dmrzzz That's a great idea. It could be done via a command-line flag, env var, or a setting in .terragrunt:

terraform = {
  path = "/foo/bar/terraform"
}

I'd happily accept a PR for that!

[dmrzzz]

PR submitted (hopefully)! This is my first-ever Go code and my first-ever github pull request, so I apologize for any newbie mistakes.

I chose env var / command-line flag as opposed to a .terragrunt setting because the value is specific to your local workstation and shouldn't be checked into source control.

[brikis98]

@dmrzzz PR worked just fine. Nice work and thank you for contributing :)

I chose env var / command-line flag as opposed to a .terragrunt setting because the value is specific to your local workstation and shouldn't be checked into source control.

Ah, yea, you're right.

[brikis98]

#76 Allows you to specify the path to Terraform via an env var or command-line option.