Atlantis and TFE integration is broken. Again...

[widogg]

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Overview of the Issue

I did a fresh Atlantis install using Helm charts. I'm using Terraform Cloud agent/remote execution.

The workspace I'm using is configured for terraform ~1.8.

The error I get is the same that has been reported multiple times, like in #704, #1628, #1687, #4196, etc.

The previous fixes can be found here and inthe next couple of lines

Reproduction Steps

Deploy a new Atlantis instance using Helm from scratch. Use a new Terraform Cloud workspace with Agent execution mode (with terraform ~1.8)

Logs

running "/home/atlantis/atlantis-data/bin/terraform1.8.1 plan -input=false -refresh -out \"/home/atlantis/atlantis-data/repos/<redacted>/terraform-azure-policies/2/default/default.tfplan\"" in "/home/atlantis/atlantis-data/repos/<redacted>/terraform-azure-policies/2/default": exit status 1
╷
│ Error: Saving a generated plan is currently not supported
│ 
│ The "remote" backend does not support saving the generated execution plan
│ locally at this time.
╵

Additional Context

Sorry if don't understand the reasons why this keeps happening. From what I could understand, the "easiest" way to work with Terraform cloud remote execution is to try to make it run, wait for it to fail, capture the error and if matches the string, run again.

This seems very convuluted and error prone, like chasing the rabbit.

Proposal

Would it be possible to assume if you are using Terraform Cloud (or enterprise) you are going to be using remote execution by default (and local as an excemption)?

If this assumption is correct, then if the tfe-token flag is defined, you skip the first run with the -save option that will fail anyway.

If, instead, you use local execution mode, then Atlantis already has a flag for that and you can run with the save option.

With this proposal, you remove the string matching, so you actually prevent future issues. Instead, you only rely on the already existing flag to know if you are using local or remote execution, and act accordingly