python-hcl2 >= 8.0.0 silently breaks tflocal — dependency version constraint missing

[wrchen-ef]

Problem

terraform-local currently has no upper bound on python-hcl2 in its dependencies.
When users upgrade to python-hcl2 >= 8.0.0, tflocal init silently skips S3 backend
handling when python-hcl2 >= 8.0.0 is installed.

What Breaks

python-hcl2 v8 introduced a breaking change in parsed output format
(PR #203):
block labels now include surrounding quotes in the dict key ("s3" → '"s3"').

This causes generate_s3_backend_config() to silently skip S3 backend handling:

• get_or_create_bucket() is never called
• No LocalStack S3 endpoint is injected into the override file
• tflocal apply creates resources successfully (provider override is unaffected),
  then fails on state upload with NoSuchBucket

The failure is particularly confusing because resources appear to succeed before the error.

Expected Behavior

Either:

• terraform-local pins python-hcl2 < 8.0.0 until full v8 compatibility is implemented, or
• A new release with v8 support is published promptly after python-hcl2 v8 is released

Publishing a new version of a library without updating dependency constraints
for breaking upstream changes leaves users silently broken with no obvious path to debug.

Fix

PR #94 already implements
v8 compatibility using SerializationOptions(strip_string_quotes=True).
Please move forward with the progress.

Versions Affected

• terraform-local: 0.24.x, 0.25.x
• python-hcl2: 8.0.0 – 8.1.1

Workarounds before fix

Option 1 — Pin python-hcl2 < 8.0.0

Option 2 — Add to xxxx.hcl directly (xxxx.hcl is passed via --backend-config
and never parsed by tflocal's hcl2.load(), so hcl2 v8 doesn't affect it):

endpoint                    = "http://localhost:4566"
force_path_style            = true   # avoids virtual-hosted DNS issue with localhost

[bentsku]

Hello @wrchen-ef and thanks for the report! This should now be fixed with the latest released version 0.26.0. We added compatibility with the new python-hcl2 version, and added a lower bound for it. Could you try installing/upgrading it and see if that would fix your issue? Thanks!

[bentsku]

Hello again, as the other related GitHub issue was confirmed to be fixed, I'll go ahead and close this issue. If you still encounter the issue with the latest version, please ping me here and I'll re-open! Thanks again for the report!