Add hcl extension support

[IxDay]

Is it possible to add support for .hcl file extension with this plugin?
Since terraform code is actually hcl + tfvars files can also be hcl it could make sense, right?
I checked the vscode plugin registry and it seems that there is no entry for this kind of files and maybe this one could handle it as it holds all the needed features

[allthingsclowd]

Agree 100% with @IxDay above.
When developing a new Packer HCL2 template within CodeSpaces, the VSCode Editor does not recognise the .pkr.hcl extension.

Simply adding the .tf extension to my packer template file fixes the syntax highlighting within the editor however this then breaks Packer validation.

E.g.
codespace ➜ /workspaces/packer-vsphere (AddTFCAgent ✗) $ packer validate "example.pkr copy.hcl.tf" Failed to parse file as legacy JSON template: if you are using an HCL template, check your file extensions; they should be either *.pkr.hcl or *.pkr.json; see the docs for more details: https://www.packer.io/docs/templates/hcl_templates.

Thank you

[radeksimko]

Hi folks,
Improving editor experience (via highlighting and other features) for "plain" (unknown) HCL or Packer/Nomad/... HCL flavour is something we keep under review. We do not have a solution for this yet though.

The key thing to understand here is that these languages (although based on HCL) differ.

• This probably shouldn't matter for simple syntax highlighting grammar, but the grammar we use currently actually is Terraform specific and will be inaccurate for any other HCL languages at this point. One possible course of action we're considering here is to make a generic HCL grammar which supports (or aims to support) superset of all HCL2 features across known deployments (i.e. Packer, Nomad etc.). While such grammar may end up replacing the current one in this Terraform plugin, it's likely we would create a dedicated small HCL plugin that leverages the same grammar people can use if there isn't a product-specific plugin (e.g. Packer one). i.e. a "Terraform" plugin likely will never claim to support plain hcl, but an "HCL" plugin would. This is not only for clean separation of concerns, but also to avoid problems where VS Code doesn't seem to handle conflicts well between two plugins claiming the same file extension.
• This matters for any other features, such as formatting, completion, hover, etc. which all require much deeper understanding of the flavour of HCL used by each individual product because each product uses different language constructs (block names, attributes, functions, way of formatting configs etc.). This could potentially be addressed by a dedicated Packer, Nomad etc. plugin which in turn talks to dedicated Packer/Nomad/... language server, similar to https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-ls

[allthingsclowd]

Makes sense, thank you for the explanation. I made the assumption all things HCL were equal.

[julian-alarcon]

A PR is available to add .hcl #615

[radeksimko]

Hi folks,
#638 and #639 outline our plans for handling other non-Terraform HCL files.

TL;DR we plan to have a dedicated extension which would most likely claim *.hcl only and that extension would provide all HCL-generic functionality, such as highlighting that is relevant for any HCL file (without knowing whether it's Terraform, Packer, Nomad, Waypoint or anything else).

In the interest of keeping conversations in one place I'm going to close this issue in favour of the two mentioned ones.

Thanks!

[github-actions]

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