Run Tasks

Note

Run tasks are integrated and managed by platform operators — see the Administration Guide: Run tasks management.

Overall flow for Run Tasks within a run

Run tasks are invoked before and after the plan and apply stages of a Terraform run. The information that is available at each stage is presented to the run task when invoked. At the pre-plan stage, the information available will mainly be the code and other attributes; at post-plan and later stages, more information associated with the results of the plan will be available.

Selecting the stage to associate a run task to will vary for a number of factors. The pre-plan stage would be used when the run task is going to examine the code and make a determination if entering the plan stage should even be allowed. The other stages primarily depend on how far you want a plan to go before being stopped by a failure result of the run task and what states of provisioning you are able to accept.

For example, a post-plan or pre-apply run task will examine the plan and determine whether an apply should be allowed. A post-apply would be used mainly to test and possibly gather/store information related to the infrastructure that has been provisioned. Check the documentation for the run task being configured if there are particular stages required or suggested to satisfy its requirements.

Multiple run tasks can be defined at a single stage. They will execute in sequence and in no particular order that could be depended on (do not assume any dependencies between run tasks). Once all run tasks complete for a stage, the continuation of the run is determined by the most restrictive enforcement level in each associated run task.

For example, if a mandatory task fails and an advisory task succeeds, the run fails. If an advisory task fails, but a mandatory task succeeds, the run succeeds and proceeds to the next stage. Regardless of the exit status of the run tasks, HCP Terraform displays the status and any related messages are recorded and appear in the run results.

Available Run Tasks

The common implementation of run tasks will be to implement an existing run task that integrates with a specific complementary product, usually provided and supported by a HashiCorp technology partner that provides that product. These are published in the public Terraform Registry where you can then view the most up-to-date list of available run tasks with links to the partner’s usage documentation. Other vendors or community members may offer run tasks for specific integrations, but they will not be published to the public Terraform Registry, and should be handled as any other open source software.

In addition to using existing technology partner integrations, HashiCorp Terraform customers can build their own custom run task integrations. The process of developing custom run tasks is discussed in a separate topic in this documentation set.