OpenTofu went GA on January 10th, 2024. It’s intended to be an open-source alternative for Terraform. Given HashiCorp’s recent change in direction, we’re excited to work with and contribute to it. Here’s some background on OpenTofu, its mission and what you can do with it.
What are OpenTofu and Terraform?
OpenTofu and Terraform are Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) software tools (similar to Chef, Puppet etc.), primarily used to automate the deployment of IT infrastructure. Users can define and provision data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.
Who created OpenTofu and why?
OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform’s open-source code, created on August 25th, 2023. A group of Open Source developers created OpenTofu after HashiCorp switched the license for Terraform from open-source to a Business Source license on August 10, 2023. Going forward, the Linux Foundation will maintain OpenTofu.
Can current users of Terraform easily migrate?
Yes. In fact, OpenTofu created a migration guide for current Terraform users. Our team have been big proponents of using Terraform, but, given HashiCorp’s new direction, we’re excited about playing with OpenTofu.
What are the differences between OpenTofu and Terraform?
Since OpenTofu uses the same codebase, it’s compatible with Terraform versions 1.5.x and most of 1.6.x. Going forward the two will diverge. Since OpenTofu is open-source, it will likely incorporate a broader set of feature requests and support. An example of this is RFC for client-side state encryption.
How to Contribute to OpenTofu
The most obvious way to contribute to the OpenTofu initiative is to download it from GitHub, install and put it through its paces. Ideally, while doing that, you’ll run into something – either a bug or a feature you’d like to see added. You can submit a feature request on GitHub.
Conclusion
Based on our initial review, OpenTofu looks like a solid open-source Terraform alternative. As our team gains more experience working with OpenTofu, we’ll probably put out an update to our blog post about DevOps with GitHub and Terraform. In the meantime, we’d love to hear about your experience, so don’t hesitate to get in touch!