Not converting list objects

[Chaouki-Tiouassiouine]

I have this variables.tf which contains a list as objects

variable "configure_teams" {
  type = list(object({
    name        = string
    description = string
    privacy     = optional(string, "closed")
    parent_team = optional(string)
    members     = optional(list(string))
  }))
  default = []
}

When using hcl2json command, it outputs:

{
  "variable": {
    "configure_teams": {
      "default": null,
      "type": "list(object({\r\n    name        = string\r\n    description = string\r\n    privacy     = optional(string, \"closed\")\r\n    parent_team = optional(string)\r\n    members     = optional(list(string))\r\n  }))"
    }
  }
}

which is not desirable.

[phene]

Yeah, it doesn't provide any structure/parsing for terraform variable types. This really would be awesome.

[phene]

It should be possible by leveraging this

[tmccombs]

I can't reproduce this on master. Which version are you using?

[phene]

@tmccombs I think the issue is better stated as:

hcl2json does not parse Terraform variable types into a JSON structure.

This could be possible by using HCL's typeexpr library on these fields, which I linked to above.

[tmccombs]

hcl2json is a generic tool, it isn't aware of the terraform schema (although, such a tf2json tool would be useful). So it doesn't have a way to know that "type" should be treated as a typeexpr instead of a regular expression

[tmccombs]

I'm also not really sure what you expect to get here.

[phene]

For what it's worth, I agree that a separate tf2json tool makes the most sense. I ended up solving this problem myself by:

1. Use hcl2json to convert a variables.tf file to JSON
2. Run a separate parser I wrote myself using a grammar definition I derived from the docs on the type field

With my parser, the above type would produce:

{
    "type": "list",
    "optional": false,
    "child": {
        "type": "object",
        "optional": false,
        "children": {
            "name": {
                "type": "string",
                "optional": false
            },
            "description": {
                "type": "string",
                "optional": false
            },
            "privacy": {
                "type": "string",
                "optional": true,
                "default": "closed"
            },
            "parent_team": {
                "type": "string",
                "optional": true
            },
            "members": {
                "type": "list",
                "optional": true,
                "child": {
                    "type": "string",
                    "optional": false
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

My goal was to be able to also produce an object that I could use to validate an arbitrary JSON blob as complying with the variable's type.

[phene]

If @Chaouki-Tiouassiouine has a specific use-case or opinion, I encourage him to share it.