How to Extract the variable values from terraform variables.tf file using PowerShell commands

Question

I have a variables.tf file which contains all the project variables and im trying to fetch a variable values using PowerShell.

variables.tf

variable "products" {
   default = [
     "Product-1",
     "Product-2",
     "Product-3",
     "Product-4"
     ]
}

variable "product_unified_container" {
   default =  [
     "cont-data",
     "cont-data-2"
     ]
}

variable "location" {
  default = "westeurope"
}

Using PowerShell i need to be able to fetch the variable values for any variable I want.

Example : the command should give me a array of all the products variables in variables.tf if it has multiple values.

write-host $product_list

Product-1

Product-2

Product-3

Product-4

if the variable has one value then it should give me that value like "location" variable.

write-host $deployed_location

westeurope

Answer 1

I was going through a similar problem so, I can share a way using which you can extract the values. The problem is it is easy to extract and manipulate values in a json or other format but in tf files it is not the same. So, I have basically used a workaround where I have to set the given file in a structure that the values are filled in one single line So, variables.tf will look

variable "products" {
   default = ["Product-1", "Product-2", "Product-3", "Product-4"]
}

variable "product_unified_container" {
   default =  ["cont-data","cont-data-2"]
}

variable "location" {
  default = "westeurope"
}

Next comes the PS code to extract the values of variables-

$paramsArray = @()
[system.array]$params = Select-String -Path "variables.tf" -Pattern "default =" -SimpleMatch
if (!([string]::IsNullOrEmpty($Params)))
        {
            [system.array]$paramsStrings =  $params -split {$_ -eq "="}

            foreach ($paramString in $paramsStrings)
            {
             
                if (($paramString -match "TF-Template") -or ($paramString -match "tf:"))
                    {
                       #Write-Output $paramString
                    }
                    else
                    {
                      If ($paramsArray -notcontains $paramString)
                      {
                        $paramsArray+=$paramString
                      }
                    }
            }
        }

write-host $paramsArray

The output generated is-

Since this is an array you can iterate and use it later in the script.