terraform-docs/docs/user-guide/how-to.md

title, description, menu, weight, toc

title	description	menu	weight	toc
How To's	terraform-docs how to's on variety of topics.	docs parent user-guide	140	true

Visibility of Sections

Output generated by terraform-docs consists of different [sections] which are visible by default. The visibility of these can be controlled by one or combination of:

• --show-all
• --hide-all
• --show <name>
• and --hide <name>

terraform-docs --show-all --hide header ...                # show all sections except 'header'
terraform-docs --hide-all --show inputs --show outputs ... # hide all sections except 'inputs' and 'outputs'

Module Header

Module header can be extracted from different sources. Default file to extract header from is main.tf, otherwise you can specify the file with --header-from FILE or corresponding header-from in configuration file. Supported file formats to read header from are:

• .adoc
• .md
• .tf
• .txt

The whole file content is being extracted as module header when extracting from .adoc, .md, or .txt. But to extract header from .tf file you need to use following javascript, c or java like multi-line comment:

/**
 * # Main title
 *
 * Everything in this comment block will get extracted.
 *
 * You can put simple text or complete Markdown content
 * here. Subsequently if you want to render AsciiDoc format
 * you can put AsciiDoc compatible content in this comment
 * block.
 */

resource "foo" "bar" { ... }

Note: This comment must start at the immediate first line of the .tf file before any resource, variable, module, etc.

Note: we will never alter line-endings of extracted header text and will assume whatever extracted is intended as is. It's up to you to apply any kind of Markdown formatting to them (i.e. adding <SPACE><SPACE> at the end of lines for break, etc.)

Module Footer

Extracting module footer works exactly like header with one exception. There is no default file to attempt extraction from, you need to explicitly specify desired file to extract content from with --footer-from FILE or corresponding footer-from in configuration file.

Insert Output To File

Since v0.12.0 generated output can be insterted directly into the file. There are two modes of insersion: inject (default) or replace. Take a look at [output] configuration for all the details.

terraform-docs markdown table --output-file README.md --output-mode inject /path/to/module

Generate terraform.tfvars

You can generate terraform.tfvars in both hcl and json format by executing the following, respectively:

terraform-docs tfvars hcl /path/to/module

terraform-docs tfvars json /path/to/module

Note: Required input variables will be "" (empty) in HCL and null in JSON format.

GitHub Action

To use terraform-docs GitHub Action, configure a YAML workflow file (e.g. .github/workflows/documentation.yml) with the following:

name: Generate terraform docs
on:
  - pull_request

jobs:
  docs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}

    - name: Render terraform docs and push changes back to PR
      uses: terraform-docs/gh-actions@v0.6.0
      with:
        working-dir: .
        output-file: USAGE.md
        output-method: inject
        git-push: "true"

Read more about [terraform-docs GitHub Action] and its configuration and examples.

Pre-commit Hook

With [pre-commit], you can ensure your Terraform module documentation is kept up-to-date each time you make a commit.

First, simply create or update a .pre-commit-config.yaml in the root of your Git repo with at least the following content:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/terraform-docs/terraform-docs
    rev: <VERSION TAG OR SHA TO USE> # For example: "v0.11.2"
    hooks:
      - id: terraform-docs-go
        args: [<ARGS TO PASS INCLUDING PATH>]  # For example: ["--output-file", "README.md", "./mymodule/path"]

(You can also include more than one entry under hooks: to update multiple docs. Just be sure to adjust the args: to pass the path you want terraform-docs to scan.)

Second, install [pre-commit] and run pre-commit to activate the hooks.

Then, make a Terraform change, git add and git commit! Pre-commit will regenerate your Terraform docs, after which you can rerun git add and git commit to commit the code and doc changes together.

You can also regenerate the docs manually by running pre-commit -a terraform-docs.

Pre-commit via Docker

The pre-commit hook can also be run via Docker, for those who don't have Go installed. Just use id: terraform-docs-docker in the previous example.

This will build the Docker image from the repo, which can be quite slow. To download the pre-built image instead, change your .pre-commit-config.yaml to:

repos:
  - repo: local
    hooks:
      - id: terraform-docs
        name: terraform-docs
        language: docker_image
        entry: quay.io/terraform-docs/terraform-docs:latest  # Or, change latest to pin to a specific version
        args: [<ARGS TO PASS INCLUDING PATH>]  # For example: ["--output-file", "README.md", "./mymodule/path"]
        pass_filenames: false

Git Hook

A simple git hook (.git/hooks/pre-commit) added to your local terraform repository can keep your Terraform module documentation up to date whenever you make a commit. See also [git hooks] documentation.

#!/bin/sh

# Keep module docs up to date
for d in modules/*; do
  if terraform-docs md "$d" > "$d/README.md"; then
    git add "./$d/README.md"
  fi
done

Note: This is very basic and higly simplified version of [pre-commit-terraform]. Please refer to it for complete examples and guides.

[sections]: {{< ref "configuration/#sections" >}} [output]: {{< ref "configuration/#output" >}} [terraform-docs GitHub Action]: https://github.com/terraform-docs/gh-actions [pre-commit]: https://pre-commit.com/ [git hooks]: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks [pre-commit-terraform]: https://github.com/antonbabenko/pre-commit-terraform