Incompatible API version with plugin. Plugin version: 4, client versions: [5]

[tp20165]

While issuing command… terraform 0.12upgrade… I am getting following error:
failed to load provider “template”: Incompatible API version with plugin. Plugin version: 4, client versions: [5]
Did not get any error for… terraform init
I am using same providers for other projects which I was able to upgrade to 0.12

[tp20165]

I found this thread but does not work for me…

Failed to instantiate provider "local" to obtain schema

Hi folks, I’ve upgraded my Terraform client to the latest version available from brew: $ terraform version Terraform v0.12.7 + provider.aws v2.12.0 + provider.local v1.1.0 Our Terraform project was upgraded to 0.12 sometime ago by a former colleague (no idea how it was tested after upgrading). Now, when I run terraform plan in the project, I get this error: Error: Failed to instantiate provider “local” to obtain schema: Incompatible API version with plugin. Plugin version: 4, Client version…

[apparentlymart]

Hi @tp20165,

This message usually appears when Terraform is finding a manually-installed copy of the template provider on your system and trying to use that in preference to the normal automatic installation, if the manually-installed copy is too old to support Terraform 0.12.

In that other topic we saw Terraform’s internal logs (activated by setting the environment variable TF_LOG=TRACE before running Terraform) showing where the provider in question was coming from:

2019-08-23T16:07:53.558-0700 [DEBUG] plugin: starting plugin: path=/Users/miketitus/Workspace/git/spelljammer/clusters/dev-spelljammer/.terraform/plugins/darwin_amd64/terraform-provider-local_v1.1.0_x4 args=[/Users/miketitus/Workspace/git/spelljammer/clusters/dev-spelljammer/.terraform/plugins/darwin_amd64/terraform-provider-local_v1.1.0_x4]

In that case, the problem was a provider already available in the local auto-install cache under .terraform/plugins, but the fixes I shared there would not work for a plugin installed elsewhere on the system. If you run Terraform with that TF_LOG=TRACE environment variable set then you should see a similar log line just before the error message which will tell you which executable Terraform is using for the template provider.

If what you have is just a local copy of the official provider from releases.hashicorp.com then you could just delete your local copy and let terraform init install a newer version. If you have a local copy because you’ve modified the provider in some way, you may need to re-apply such modifications to the latest version of the provider and rebuild.

[tp20165]

Thank You. Upgrading to latest version of template provider worked for me.