provider-schemas.md

Provider Schemas

Completion, hover, and validation for resource and data blocks come from a provider schema. The version of that schema determines which attributes are considered valid, so a stale schema can produce false Unexpected attribute diagnostics.

Sources

The server uses one of two sources for each provider:

Bundled. A selection of popular providers is embedded into every tofu-ls release, one version per provider, refreshed at release time. Used when no local schema is available, typically before tofu init has been run.

Local (from tofu init). When a directory contains .terraform/ and .terraform.lock.hcl, the server runs tofu providers schema -json and uses the result. This requires tofu on PATH. Re-run when the lock file or module manifest changes.

How the server picks between them

When more than one schema exists for the same provider, candidates are scored and the highest wins:

Factor	Score
tofu init schema in the current module	+2
tofu init schema in a different module in the workspace	0
Bundled schema	-1
Version satisfies the module's required_providers constraint	+2

A local schema for the current module always beats the bundled one. The bundled schema is the fallback.

Troubleshooting

If Unexpected attribute is reported for an attribute added in a newer provider release:

• If you have run tofu init, the lock file is pinning an older version. Run tofu init -upgrade; the server picks up the change when the lock file is updated.
• If you have not run tofu init, run it. If the bundled schema is also older than the feature, update tofu-ls (or the editor extension that ships it).

If the diagnostic still seems wrong, you can disable schema-based diagnostics with validation.enableEnhancedValidation and open an issue.