Clickable links in terraform plan output

[jpogran]

Problem Statement

If you run any command in a VS Code terminal window that outputs text with a link in it, VS Code renders the text as a clickable link. This works for web links as well as file paths.

A terraform plan output contains output that has the names/ids of the resources, which are directly related to the definitions in the configuration files being parsed.

Expected User Experience

If you run terraform plan in a VS Code terminal window and hover over a resource definition, it should indicate that it is a clickable link. Clicking the link opens the relevant file where the declaration is defined.

This is similar to the 'Go to Definition' experience.

Proposal

We can register a new terminal link handler that implements the vscode.TerminalLinkProvider interface using the vscode.window.registerTerminalLinkProvider method that will trigger when a user hovers over a line in the terminal. After detecting a resource statement, a call to terraform-ls can return location information where the statement is defined. If nothing is found, the line is left unmodified.

[radeksimko]

I like the idea! 👍🏻

After detecting a resource statement, ...

Is the assumption that we'd just treat any space-separated word in the terminal output as something that could be a resource address, or is there any way to detect what process generated the output and hook only into Terraform output?

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At the risk of thinking outside the box (box being the extension)... This could theoretically be a Core feature where the rendered plan/apply includes links such as file.tf:Line:Col.

Downsides?

• We'd need buy in from the Core team
• Core would need to detect terminals accurately enough as to not render escape characters to terminals which don't support it.
  • I am not sure what's the real support today in commonly used terminals. There's some info in https://gist.github.com/egmontkob/eb114294efbcd5adb1944c9f3cb5feda This could potentially be significant enough downside causing this whole idea to fall apart. 😅

Upsides?

• This could cover potentially any IDE (subject to terminal support as mentioned above)
• It would help avoid false positives where we'd end up linking to resource from some random string in output from non-Terraform program just because it looks like a resource address.

[dbanck]

Related:

• Docs on Terminal links: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/terminal/basics#_links
• LinkProvider for Git: https://github.com/gitkraken/vscode-gitlens/blob/33bc5845d92e22f8e920a3b3f22308c702bfb702/src/terminal/linkProvider.ts

[gregorypease280]

I love this as I am currently importing a lot of resources and going back and forth is a chore

[jawadqur]

This would be amazing to have in core actually. Is there a way where we can connect with core team and send a feature request and/or pull request?