pipeform is a TUI for Terraform runtime progress.

pipeform as its name indicates, shall be preceded by terraform run, through a pipe (|). Only the following terraform commands are supported:

• terraform refresh -json
• terraform plan -json
• terraform apply -auto-approve -json

Note that all the commands must have the -json flag specified, as the tool is built on top of the Terraform machine-readable UI.

Example:

go install github.com/magodo/pipeform@main

The tool will generate a CSV file for further analysis/visualization by specifying the --time-csv=<path> option.

A taste of the output:

Start Timestamp,End Timestamp,Stage,Action,Module,Resource Type,Resource Name,Resource Key,Status,Duration (sec)
1735018449,1735018453,apply,create,,null_resource,cluster,13,complete,4
1735018449,1735018453,apply,create,,null_resource,cluster,3,complete,4
1735018449,1735018451,apply,create,,null_resource,cluster,1,complete,2
1735018450,1735018451,apply,create,,null_resource,cluster,25,complete,1
1735018450,1735018452,apply,create,,null_resource,cluster,26,complete,2

By default, pipeform requires a tty to make the UI work, which is unavailable in most CI systems (e.g. Github Action has no tty). To support this environment, the tool comes with an option --plain-ui, which will print out logs similar to the terraform default logs, except for the operations, it will prefix with a progress indicator.

Example.

In a successful run, the tool will end up at the SUMMARY stage, that displays a table of output variables defined. Users can select any of the output variables and press c to copy the value to the system clipboard.

Note that the clipboard functionality is only enabled when the tool is built properly (CGO might be required) on a supported platform. Details.

When the tool ends in either successful or failed state, the user is supposed to quit. Then the tool will print the Terraform JSON warning/error diagnostics to stderr.

Especially, if Terraform encounters an error, the tool will display an error indicator ❌ in the "state" section on the top left and stay in the terminated state.

There are two ways to exit during operation:

• Terminate pipeform
• Terminate terraform

Though, it is highly recommended NOT to terminate in the middle of the run.

There is a key bind for terminating pipeform. When the user hit the key to quit, pipeform will quit immediately, which causes the pipe to close. Since terraform is still running and piping out logs, it will then hit a SIGPIPE signal, which terraform has no special handling and defaults to terminate terraform immediately.

Terraform can be terminated by interruption (ctrl-c). It even has some graceful handling for the interruption signal.

Whilst when using pipeform, since the terminal is turned into raw mode, pressing ctrl-c won't send the signal at all. Instead, you'll have to send the signal manually.

Under Linux you can do something as below:

$ # Find out the ppid of the `pipeform`
$ ps -ef | grep pipeform
magodo     88375    8823  1 11:05 pts/7    00:00:00 pipeform
magodo     89764   49424  0 11:05 pts/6    00:00:00 grep --color pipeform
$ # 8823 is the ppid of `pipeform`
$ # Use pstree to find the pid of the preceded `terraform`
$ pstree -lpT 8823
zsh(8823)─┬─pipeform(88375)
          └─terraform(88374)───terraform-provi(88695)
$ # 88374 is the pid of `terraform`
$ # Send the signal manully
$ kill -SIGINT 88374

After terraform being interrupted in the middle, pipeform won't just quit. Instead, it will respond to the diagnostics sent from terraform (once terraform finishes its graceful handling) and display the error indicators to users.