What's the deal with requiring release tags to start with "v"?

Terraform Providers Plugin Development
1

Terraform users experience provider versions like 1.2.3, but the registry requires those providers to be tagged on GitHub with values like v1.2.3.

Is this some grandfathered-in nonsense because somebody used a v ages ago, or is the v solving a problem which I haven’t spotted yet?

I’m noodling over a similar webhook-triggered release handling process for an unrelated project and found myself wondering why the v is important.

Thanks!

2

Personally i prefer using the “v”, as I find it aesthetically pleasing.

It might also make it easier for “anchoring” regex" expressions? :grinning_face:

3

I honestly don’t remember where the two different version formats within the codebase are derived from, probably lost to history, but the practice of using v existed well before Terraform. The Go ecosystem requires v as part of the version number.

The official semver site does acknowledge that prefixing a version with v is common practice to visually indicate that it’s a version number, and is often used with VCS tags (which we do rely on ourselves for versioning).

4

Thanks @runeron and @jbardin.

Personally i prefer using the “v”, as I find it aesthetically pleasing.

I like it too, and tend to unconsciously include the v when typing required_providers blocks from memory. Then Terraform corrects me :slight_smile:

The official semver site does acknowledge that prefixing a version with v is common

Common, but not permitted, apparently.

The fact that hashicorp’s parsing library accounts for it came as a little bit of a surprise when I started digging into this question.

Between that and the registry docs insisting on the v, I thought there might be some deeper meaning that I was missing out on.

Thanks!