How to write terraform plan to a tab in azure devops pipeline summary?

Question

Some Terraform extensions like this are providing a feature to publish Terraform plan to a tab in the pipeline run overview/summary.

Terraform task published by Microsoft DevLabs is not currently supporting this feature.

I'm trying to make use of the pipeline logging command uploadsummary as a workaround for this.

  # Write terraform show output in default format to a markdown file
  - task: TerraformTaskV4@4
    name: TerraformShow
    displayName: Terraform Show
    inputs:
      provider: 'azurerm'
      environmentServiceNameAzureRM: $(sctfbackend)
      command: 'show'
      commandOptions: 'tfplan -no-color'
      outputTo: 'file'
      outputFormat: 'default'
      fileName: '$(working_dir)/TerraformPlan.md'
      workingDirectory: $(working_dir)

  # Display plan in the pipeline build summary
  - task: Bash@3
    displayName: Show plan summary
    inputs:
      targetType: 'inline'
      workingDirectory: '$(working_dir)'
      script: |
        echo "##vso[task.uploadsummary]$(working_dir)/TerraformPlan.md"

But it reads the input file as Markdown. So the formatting of the output looks ugly in the tab. The # in the plan output will be taken as heading1 in Markdown. + will be taken as bullets for list...etc as shown below:

How can I fix this to get a cleaner Terraform plan tab in the pipeline summary?

Answer 1

I found the workaround.

This snippet can be used in the pipeline to achieve the same.

  # NOTE: Some lines in the output were missing while using this task.
  # Write terraform show output in default format to a markdown file
  - task: TerraformTaskV4@4
    name: TerraformShow
    displayName: Terraform Show
    inputs:
      provider: 'azurerm'
      environmentServiceNameAzureRM: $(sctfbackend)
      command: 'show'
      commandOptions: 'tfplan -no-color'
      outputTo: 'file'
      outputFormat: 'default'
      fileName: '$(working_dir)/TerraformPlan.md'
      workingDirectory: $(working_dir)

  # Display plan in the pipeline build summary
  - task: Bash@3
    displayName: Show plan summary
    inputs:
      targetType: 'inline'
      workingDirectory: '$(working_dir)'
      script: |
        ls -la
        sed -i '1 i\```' TerraformPlan.md
        echo '```' >> TerraformPlan.md
        echo "##vso[task.uploadsummary]$(working_dir)/TerraformPlan.md"

The first step is to get the plan file using -out. Then show the plan with the flag -no-color to avoid the coloring characters in the output.

Write it to a markdown file.

Enclosing the content of that file in a code block of markdown will provide much cleaner formatting.

Then publish the file to the pipeline summary.