Bare Include

Migrating from bare includes

The earliest form of include support in Terragrunt was a bare include.

e.g.

# terragrunt.hcl

include {
    path = find_in_parent_folders("root.hcl")
}

Once Terragrunt supported the ability to define multiple includes, and to expose the values in includes as variables, users could optionally use named includes instead of a bare include.

e.g.

# terragrunt.hcl

include "root" {
    path = find_in_parent_folders("root.hcl")
}

HCL parsing does not support the ability to parse HCL configuration and accept that a configuration block has zero or more attributes, so a workaround in Terragrunt internals was to parse the configuration, then rewrite it internally to avoid breaking backwards compatibility for bare includes.

e.g.

# terragrunt.hcl

include {
    path = find_in_parent_folders("root.hcl")
}

becomes:

# terragrunt.hcl

include "" {
    path = find_in_parent_folders("root.hcl")
}

Especially on large projects, this extra work is not worth the performance penalty, and Terragrunt has deprecated support for bare includes.

In a future version of Terragrunt, users will be required to use named includes for all includes.