opentofu

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OpenTofu is an OSS tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. OpenTofu can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.

Getting help and contributing

• Have a question?
  • Post it in GitHub Discussions
    • Open a GitHub issue
    • Join us in the #opentofu channel on the CNCF Slack!
• Want to contribute?
  • Please read the Contribution Guide.
• Recurring Events
  • Community Meetings on Wednesdays at 12:30 UTC (calendar)
    • Technical Steering Committee Meetings every other Tuesday at 4pm UTC (calendar)

Key features

• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
• Execution Plans: OpenTofu has a “planning” step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what OpenTofu will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when OpenTofu manipulates infrastructure.
• Resource Graph: OpenTofu builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, OpenTofu builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
• Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what OpenTofu will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors.

Nightly Builds

Nightly builds are available for testing the latest changes on main. These are experimental and not intended for production use. Each build is removed after 30 days.

Nightly builds can be found at https://nightlies.opentofu.org/nightlies. For those who want to automate with tooling, https://nightlies.opentofu.org/nightlies/latest.json will be kept up to date with the latest build information.

For more details, see RELEASE.md.

Reporting security vulnerabilities

If you’ve found a vulnerability or a potential vulnerability in OpenTofu please follow Security Policy. We’ll send a confirmation email to acknowledge your report, and we’ll send an additional email when we’ve identified the issue positively or negatively.

If you believe you have found any possible copyright or intellectual property issues, please contact [email protected]. We’ll send a confirmation email to acknowledge your report.

Registry Access

In an effort to comply with applicable sanctions, we block access from specific countries of origin. For more details, see the Registry Inclusion Policy.

License

Mozilla Public License v2.0

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Summary

Linux-Foundation-backed community fork of Terraform from the BUSL exodus (30.3k stars, MPL-2.0, Go): drop-in replacement sharing HCL, providers and state; adds community roadmap items HashiCorp deprioritized (native state encryption, .tofu.hcl overrides, provider dev loop). NOTE: repo lives in the ‘opentofu’ org now — the old ‘opentofu-org/opentofu’ path 404s (org rename).

Learnings

• The fork proves the license threat was real but the tech was not the grievance: identical engine semantics, so choosing it is a governance decision, not an engineering one. The interesting question for the homelab: at what scale does any state-file engine beat hand-rolling — the dnscontrol precedent (JS config, no state file, push-only) suggests push-based controllers fit small fleets better than full reconciliation loops.

Gotchas

• (none yet)

Hands-on

(open: first state file — one Oracle Cloud resource; compare HCL ergonomics vs dnsconfig.js)