Enable http data source to accept binary data

[nanasi880]

Terraform CLI and Provider Versions

 $ terraform version
Terraform v1.1.8
on darwin_amd64

provider "registry.terraform.io/hashicorp/http" {
  version = "2.2.0"
}

Use Cases or Problem Statement

HTTP data sources can be used to download externally provided tools and binary data. For example, to manage a Kubernetes cluster, you can obtain the same version of the kubectl command as the cluster as follows

data "http" "kubectl" {
  url = "https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/v1.24.0/bin/darwin/amd64/kubectl"
}

However, current HTTP data sources expect response data to be text data, and dumping response data, for example, as shown below, will produce corrupted data.

resource "local_sensitive_file" "kubectl" {
  filename        = "${path.module}/kubectl"
  content_base64  = base64encode(data.http.kubectl.response_body)
  file_permission = "0755"
}

Proposal

Add the base64_response_body read-only attribute, which is mainly intended for binary data. When reading values through this attribute, the provider is not aware of the content, but treats it only as an octet-stream. The result is encoded in base64 format for safe handling as a string in Terraform.

Example

data "http" "kubectl" {
  url = "https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/v1.24.0/bin/darwin/amd64/kubectl"
}

resource "local_sensitive_file" "kubectl" {
  filename        = "${path.module}/kubectl"
  content_base64  = data.http.kubectl.base64_response_body
  file_permission = "0755"
}

How much impact is this issue causing?

Medium

Additional Information

No response

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