Exit codes and output

tfsprout is built on the go/analysis multichecker driver, and inherits its output and exit behavior.

Exit codes

Code Meaning
0 Analysis completed and no check reported a finding
1 Usage error — an unknown flag, a bad package pattern, or a package that failed to load or type-check
3 Analysis completed and at least one finding was reported

The failure code for findings is 3, not 1. This trips people writing CI conditionals. Treat any non-zero status as failure rather than testing for a specific code:

if ! tfsprout ./...; then
  echo "lint failed"
  exit 1
fi

A code of 1 means tfsprout could not do its job — most often your provider does not compile. Fix the build first; a lint run against code that does not type-check is meaningless. See Troubleshooting.

Report format

Findings go to stderr, one per line, in go vet format:

path/to/file.go:LINE:COLUMN: CHECKID: message

For example:

internal/service/example/resource_thing.go:42:3: AT001: missing CheckDestroy
internal/service/example/schema.go:17:5: S013: schema should configure one of Computed, Optional, or Required

The path is relative to the directory tfsprout was invoked from. The check ID prefix is part of the message, which makes findings greppable by check:

tfsprout ./... 2>&1 | grep -c 'S013:'

JSON output

The driver supports -json for machine-readable output:

tfsprout -json ./...

The result is a nested object keyed by package ID, then by analyzer name, containing diagnostic objects with posn, message, and — where a check supports it — suggested_fixes. This is the format to parse if you are building a reviewdog-style annotation pipeline rather than scraping text.

Two differences from the default output are worth knowing:

See also