magic-modules VS attr_json

Given: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3...

how would any reasonable person know what https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... to enable without (a) trying it and squinting at the error message (b) clicking on the <> then realizing it, also, does not mention run.googleapis.com, click on "supported service endpoints" <https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#rest_endpoi...> and only then learning about https://cloud.google.com/run/docs/reference/rest#service:-ru...

Repeat for https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/5.3... although in both cases I guess the astute reader may have spotted the run.googleapis.com in the forbidden service labels and cloudidentity.googleapis.com in the example

Since, to the best of my knowledge those bindings are auto generated <https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules#magic-m...>, I would hypothesize it is not insurmountable drop in the seemingly existing declaration of APIs required: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d... https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules/blob/7d...

In the case of the Google Cloud Platform provider, folks at Google built magic modules with the explicit goal of being able to generate schemas and behaviors for a Terraform provider and for other systems with similar needs. Since the vendor was explicitly aiming to support Terraform, this was the most ideal case where the schema could be designed to contain all of the information needed to generate a functional, usable provider.

I think the "Developing the provider" instructions in this provider's repository are rather stale, because they still talk about GOPATH even though that's been obsolete for several Go versions now. Note also that much of the code in that repository is auto-generated from an upstream repository googleCloudPlatform/magic-modules, and so for some changes it may be better to contribute there once you've tested the modifications more directly inside the provider repository.

For GCP, both ansible modules and terraform modules are actually generated from https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules, so their "production readiness" are the same.

I understand that mitchellh himself personally created a bunch of cloud modules for terraform at the beginning, and those were likely of higher quality than whatever created by some internal developers assigned by Google/Microsoft, and might be slightly better than the AWS modules maintained by community.

Anyway, when it comes to ansible versus terraform, we shall move the discourse to states management instead. With ansible, you don't have to deal with states, but will need to clean up the cloud resources separately. With terraform, you can use the tool to clean up the cloud resources easily, but then you also have the headache of managing states. Plus, whenever you change something, there is always the nagging feeling that it will do a destroy/recreate instead of an in-place update.

The Terraform provider for Google Cloud uses partial autogeneration, here is the repo that does the autogeneration for multiple automation tools:

https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/magic-modules

https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json (by me)

I myself maintain one solution meant for rails attributes stored in a json column, at https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json

One of these two should do the trick: https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json https://github.com/DmitryTsepelev/store_model

I also have a similar "competing" in some ways gem at: https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json

Some relational databases like Postgres and MySQL support JSON columns. This is useful if, for example, you want to create an ecommerce application with a products table with many variations - what is called Single Table Inheritance (STI). You can have some regular columns for the common attributes, and a JSON column for the specific ones.

If your app is built with Rails, you can use this library to help you on that (I'm not affiliated with it): https://github.com/jrochkind/attr_json