CDKTF: Support -refresh=false on plan/diff and apply

[Danielku15]

Description

The cdktf-cli and components have no support for the -refresh=false option of terraform but we want to use it.

Background is that some providers like the one for GitHub are very slow and spend minutes over minutes in refreshing the state. We want to introduce a workflow where we regularly update our state to have it up-to-date (also via cdktf-cli apply) but do not do any refresh on incremental changes done as part of PRs and PR merges.

We are aware of any risks this implies.

As an alternative we could also allow users to specify any plain parameters which should be forwarded to terraform. A typical pattern I've seen for this (dotnet, npm) would be a syntax where any arguments after a -- are forwarded directly to the underlying executable:

npx cdktf-cli@latest apply Stack --auto-approve -- -refresh=false

References

• https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/cli/commands/plan#planning-options

Help Wanted

• I'm interested in contributing a fix myself

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[ansgarm]

Hi @Danielku15 👋

You should be able to use TF_CLI_ARGS_plan="-refresh=false" which is a feature of Terraform (docs).

[Danielku15]

Thanks for this hint. This certainly helps as a workaround. I assume as other arguments like --refresh-only are also available within CDKTF directly, it is intended to allow specifying the same arguments as TF itself?