You are working on terraform code and want to ensure your documentation is updated after you made some changes. Why don't you use git-hooks for that?

A long time ago I wrote about git-hooks, today I want to give you a practicle example on how I ensure my terraform documetation stays up-to-date.

terraform-docs

Not sure if you every heard of terraform-docs, but it’s a tool which generates terraform modules documentation in various formats. You can define a config file .terraform-docs.yml which defines how your documentations shall look like. My $HOME\.terraform-docs.yml looks as follows:

formatter: "markdown" # this is required

sections:
  hide: []
  show: []

content: |-
  {{ .Inputs }}
  {{ .Outputs }}
  {{ .Resources }}  

output:
  file: "README.md"
  mode: inject
  template: |-
    <!-- BEGIN_TF_DOCS -->
    {{ .Content }}
    <!-- END_TF_DOCS -->    

sort:
  enabled: false
  by: name

settings:
  anchor: true
  color: true
  default: true
  description: false
  escape: true
  hide-empty: false
  html: true
  indent: 2
  lockfile: true
  read-comments: true
  required: true
  sensitive: false
  type: true

A practical example

If you are using terraform-docs you may actually want to ensure, that the docs are created before you commit changes to git. This can be achieved by githooks

1. I define a path where my script like

   git config core.hooksPath ~/.config/git/hooks

2. Create the folder

   mkdir -p ~/.config/git/hooks

3. In that folder I create a file - in this case for the pre-commit-hook- named pre-commit

4. I make it executable and add the following code

   #!/usr/bin/env bash
   set -eo pipefail
   set -o errexit
   set -o errtrace
   shopt -s inherit_errexit
   
   if [[ -f "./.git/hooks/pre-commit" ]]; then
       sh ./.git/hooks/pre-commit
   fi
   
   # @description: generates the tf-doc incl. submodules if applicable
   function tfdocu_do() {
       # terraform-docs will locate any available configuration file without needing to explicitly pass the --config flag.
       if [ -z "$TF_DOCS_CONF" ]; then
           if [ -f "./.terraform-docs.yml" ]; then
               TF_DOCS_CONF="./.terraform-docs.yml"
           else
               TF_DOCS_CONF="$HOME/.tfdocs.d/.terraform-docs.yml"
           fi
       fi
       if terraform-docs -c $TF_DOCS_CONF $1; then
           git add "$1/README.md"
       fi
   }
   
   # @description: iterates over all modules and triggers creation of tf docu
   function tfdocu() {
       for dir in $(find . -maxdepth 1 -type d -not -path '*/.*' -not -path '.'); do
           echo "[Info] Running terraform-docs for '$dir'"
           tfdocu_do $dir
       done
   
       if [[ -n "$(ls -A *.tf 2>/dev/null)" ]]; then
           dir="."
           echo "[Info] Running terraform-docs for '$dir'"
           tfdocu_do $dir
       fi
   }
   
   ## we want terraform stuff only to be run for projects using terraform
   if [[ -n "$(ls -A *.tf 2>/dev/null)" || -n "$(find .  -maxdepth 2 -not -path '*/.*' -not -path '.' -type f -name '*.tf')" ]]; then
       tfdocu
       # "skeletons" will not be checked
       if [[ "$(pwd)" == *"skeleton"* ]]; then
           echo "[Info] This looks like a 'skeleton', so please manually run `terraform fmt`"
       else
           terraform fmt -recursive
       fi
   fi

So now when you do a git commit in a terraform related repo, it will create the docu automatically:

$ git commit -m"docu: use new template"
./module1
module1\README.md updated successfully
./module2
module2\README.md updated successfully
...
[feature/test-pre-commit-hook 5485ebd] docu: use new template
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

What’s next?

Rather than copying code around, setup a repo for your team where you store all shared git hooks. Mine can be found at here.

git clone [email protected]/papanito/git-hooks ~/.config/git/hooks