Deprecate anonymous Flag For Provider Configuration

[jcudit]

Looking for wider feedback on this approach. Please raise any concerns with this deprecation. It may be possible to shape v3.0.0 to include resource-level anonymous access if there are use cases that need better representation.

/cc https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-github/issues/502#issuecomment-652399602

[nwsparks]

Why is this being deprecated? Is there some alternative method of using the provider without providing a token that will be provided?

A common use case for this parameter is to retrieve the github IP range using the github_ip_ranges data source as seen below. If this parameter is removed how is it intended that an operation like this be achieved in the future?

provider "github" {
  anonymous  = true
  individual = true
}

data "github_ip_ranges" "github_ips" {}

[jcudit]

@nwsparks see this comment for ongoing discussion around this PR.

[radeksimko]

This looks good syntactically, but I assume that there is an amount of users which use the provider without authentication to obtain the IP ranges, as mentioned in https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-github/issues/502

Perhaps the absence of a token can signal anonymous mode . We can use this approach to our benefit to enable token-less operations (like IP Range requests) as a fallback when no token is provided, instead of erroring out.

That sounds like a pragmatic solution. I'm not as closely familiar with the needs of the broader user base or priorities, but it may be worth exploring a solution prior to deprecating this flag.

I'm not sure though how easy it is going to be to implement and if the upstream SDK makes it easy to "lazy load" the authentication only when it's needed. Also there are some benefits to validating credentials early.

Perhaps we could turn this into skip_credentials_validation to reflect how AWS provider deals with similar problem?

@bflad Do you have any wisdom to share around this field and/or how AWS provider users get around this when they need to use https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest/docs/data-sources/ip_ranges ?

It is also worth checking how the Fastly provider deals with this: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/fastly/d/ip_ranges.html

and Packet has similar data source: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/packet/d/ip_block_ranges.html

[jcudit]

The latest commit explores a solution alongside deprecating the flag. We continue to provide an anonymous mode, but we no longer require explicit configuration. Instead, when the token parameter is empty, anonymous mode is enabled.

Shipping this will help unblock re-instating the v2.9.0 features. Edits here will be preferred when fixing up conflicts when actioning https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-github/pull/508.

[anGie44]

LGTM - just a comment to add this new provider schema/provider deprecation in the website docs as well