Changelog doesn't reflect private_key path updates

[mlushpenko]

In terraform version 0.7.0 we could refer to private_key that is located in the working directory like:
private_key = "demo.pem"

In version 0.7.7 we need to change this to:
private_key = "${file("demo.pem")}"

I couldn't find this updated functionality in changelog since version 0.7.0.

I had to update all my connection blocks to make my repository https://github.com/mlushpenko/terraform-ansible work again. For instance, with version 0.7.0 this was working fine:

resource "null_resource" "ssh_copy" {
  provisioner "file" {
    source = "demo.pem"
    destination = "/home/ubuntu/demo.pem"
  }
  connection {
    user = "ubuntu"
    private_key = "demo.pem"
    host = "${aws_instance.ansible.public_ip}"
  }
}

In version 0.7.7 this connection block has to be changed to:

  connection {
    user = "ubuntu"
    private_key = "${file("demo.pem")}"
    host = "${aws_instance.ansible.public_ip}"
  }

[jbardin]

Hi @mlushpenko,

Thanks for reporting this, and sorry you're having trouble with the issue. This was the confluence of a few mistakes on our part, and we're going to try and make these changes easier to find as we go forward. The private_key wasn't intended to take a path argument, which should have been pointed out better in the CHANGELOG, and also mention key_file to make the change easier to spot. This was is only documented fully in the connection docs.

To link everything together for completeness: private_key was added last year in the 0.6.x releases by #3846, which deprecated the key_file field. Unfortunately, even though the documentation stated that private_key should use the file function to get the key contents, it still accepted a path and read the file implicitly. A recent patch which broke the old behavior went unnoticed (#8577), until the 0.7.6 release. We remove the now broken and deprecated fields, and I added a backward incompatibility note about removing the removal. What I didn't realize was that the private_key field had this same undocumented behavior which was also now changed.

[mlushpenko]

Hi @jbardin ,

thanks for the elaborate answer, I am just trying to make terraform better.

Cheers.

[ghost]

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