Terraform: Simple module tutorial fails

[gdhgdhgdh]

Hi, I'm following the simple module tutorial at http://www.terraform.io/docs/modules/create.html and finding that it doesn't work as described (using current dev compile 0.3.6-dev)

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# ls -al
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 23 14:30 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 Dec 23 14:30 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 23 14:31 child
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  127 Dec 23 14:33 main.tf
root@eddie:~/terraform/r# ls -al child/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 23 14:31 .
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Dec 23 14:30 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   72 Dec 23 14:31 main.tf

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# cat main.tf
module "child" {
    source = "./child"

    memory = "1G"
}

output "child_memory" {
    value = "${module.child.received}"
}

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# cat child/main.tf
variable "memory" {}

output "received" {
    value = "${var.memory}"
}
root@eddie:~/terraform/r# terraform apply
Error downloading modules: module child: not found, may need to be downloaded

A quick look at strace -f terraform apply output _did_ show lstat() for the child directory

[pid 20313] lstat("/root/terraform/r/child", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0

.. but no calls for the main.tf inside - what's going on?

Cheers,
Gavin.

[riywo]

Did you run terraform get in advance? In my case, this command created a symlink to the child directory and it could be referred by terraform plan.

[gdhgdhgdh]

Excellent advice, thank you.

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# terraform plan
Error downloading modules: module child: not found, may need to be downloaded

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# terraform get
Get: file:///root/terraform/r/child

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# terraform plan
Refreshing Terraform state prior to plan...


No changes. Infrastructure is up-to-date. This means that Terraform
could not detect any differences between your configuration and
the real physical resources that exist. As a result, Terraform
doesn't need to do anything.

root@eddie:~/terraform/r# terraform apply

Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

Outputs:

  child_memory = 1G

This is then a documentation bug since the only mention of the get command is further down the page in Nested Modules.

Cheers,
Gavin.

[mitchellh]

Fixed

[bjtucker]

This hint would be more helpful if it mentioned that local modules need terraform get too. I googled the error and it led me here. I didn't think downloading was what I needed to do for a local file, so I didn't try terraform get.

As an aside, terraform get worked for me but I was surprised by the syntax, minimal as it is. I was expecting to have to tell it what to get. Nope. And my module was all wrong, but terraform get told me what to fix. How cool.

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