Terramate stack discovery without git repository context

Direct Answers

1. No .git directory: Terramate still discovers all stack.hcl files by walking the filesystem from the working directory. Stack discovery is independent of Git metadata.
2. Disabling Git-based change detection: There is no stable configuration flag to disable Git detection globally. To process all discovered stacks unconditionally, avoid using --changed or --changed-since flags. Commands like terramate generate or terramate run without these flags will process every discovered stack.
3. Untracked vs. Uncommitted files: In a valid Git repository, untracked stack.hcl files are discovered by the CLI but are excluded from --changed output because they lack history. Uncommitted changes to already tracked stack.hcl files are included in --changed detection.

Discovery vs. Change Detection

It is important to distinguish between the two phases of Terramate's operation:

• Stack Discovery: A filesystem walk that locates every stack.hcl file. This requires no Git context.
• Change Detection: The process of filtering stacks based on modifications. This typically requires a readable .git directory to compare states.

If you run Terramate in an environment without Git, you can still orchestrate your stacks, but you cannot use the built-in Git-based filtering to target only modified components.

Experimental Filesystem Strategy

For versions 0.7 and later, Terramate introduced an experimental filesystem-based change detection strategy. This uses timestamps instead of Git metadata. It can be enabled via an environment variable:

export TM_CHANGE_DETECTION_STRATEGY=fs
terramate list --changed

Caution: This mode is experimental. It may not reliably detect file renames or deletions and is subject to change between minor versions.

Git Repository Behavior Matrix

Verification and Diagnostics

To verify your current environment's behavior, you can use the following scoped commands:

• Verify Discovery: Create a directory without .git, add a stack.hcl, and run terramate list.
• Verify Git Metadata: Run terramate debug git to check if the CLI can read the repository metadata.
• Verify Untracked Status: In a Git repo, add a new stack.hcl and compare the output of terramate list vs terramate list --changed.

Missing Diagnostic Detail

What Terramate version are you using, and does your environment utilize shallow clones (e.g., fetch-depth: 1 in GitHub Actions)? Shallow clones often remove the history required for --changed to function, which may necessitate the fs strategy or avoiding filters entirely.