Terraform: show line-by-line diff when JSON policy changes

[mseiwald]

Is it possible with some command line option to show a pretty line-by-line diff if for example the policy attribute of an aws_iam_role_policy resource changes? terraform currently just treats this as text and shows me the old string and the new string all in one line with \n etc. which makes it quite hard to read. Would you consider adding such a feature?

[scheffield]

+1

[conorgil]

I would love to see this enhancement. Currently, I copy/paste into a text editor where I do some manual cleanup via regex and then feed it into a JSON diff program. It is cumbersome to say the least. Having improved visual diffs directly on the command line as part of normal output would be a huge improvement.

[53ningen]

+1

[sds]

Until first-class support is included in Terraform, there is an open source project terraform-landscape that expands JSON attributes and other multiline attributes to be easier to read.

[mseiwald]

@sds this works perfectly and is exactly what I head in mind. Would be a huge improvement to integrate such functionality into terraform!

[cep21]

To add some context, there are people at my company actively choosing alternatives to terraform explicitly because the change output is difficult to read: sighting JSON in specific examples. This enhancement would be a very strong addition to making terraform more palatable.

[STRML]

Honestly, landscape is so good, it ought to be pulled into terraform master. Impressive work!

[srizzling]

While I love the output from landscape (seriously its amazing), I need to install a ruby interpreter into some of our CI tooling which breaks my heart a little bit :(

[apparentlymart]

Hi everyone! Sorry for the long silence here.

We're discussing diff rendering problems over in #15180, so I'm going to close this one just to consolidate the discussion over there. Sorry I missed this one when I did the initial pass of consolidation.

[hashibot[bot]]

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