OpenTofu, the open source fork of Terraform, has reached a significant milestone with the announcement of its general availability. The project, now under the Linux Foundation, is ready for production use after four months of development by over five dozen developers. OpenTofu offers a straightforward migration path for Terraform users and showcases the value of open source.

The release of OpenTofu 1.6 introduces several important features, including advanced testing capabilities for improved stability, an enhanced S3 state backend with new authentication methods, and a new provider and module registry. Additionally, the release includes hundreds of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements.

OpenTofu has gained significant traction in the community, with dozens of developers contributing, hundreds of active community members, thousands of GitHub followers, and support from corporate backers and technology partners such as CloudFlare, BuildKite, GitLab, and Oracle.

Looking ahead, OpenTofu 1.7 is set to introduce even more community-requested features that are not available in Terraform. These features include client-side state encryption for heightened security in regulated environments, parameterizable backends, providers, and modules for more readable code, and third-party extensibility through a plugin system for new state backends.

The general availability of OpenTofu marks a important achievement for the project and the open source community.

Source: Linux Foundation.

In this week’s issue of README Highlight (#42, 2023), we are taking a look at the following project: OpenTofu. OpenTofu is an open-source tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. It can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.

The key features of OpenTofu are:

• Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax, allowing it to be versioned and treated like any other code. It can also be shared and re-used.

• Execution Plans: OpenTofu generates an execution plan before making any changes, showing what it will do when called. This helps avoid surprises and allows for better control over infrastructure manipulation.

• Resource Graph: OpenTofu builds a graph of all resources and parallelizes the creation and modification of non-dependent resources. This ensures efficient infrastructure building and provides insight into dependencies.

• Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to infrastructure with minimal human interaction. The execution plan and resource graph help operators understand what changes will be made and in what order, reducing potential errors.

The OpenTofu repository contains the OpenTofu Core, which includes the command line interface and the main graph engine. To learn more about compiling OpenTofu and contributing suggested changes, refer to the contributing guide. Bug reports and enhancement requests can also be submitted following the same guide.

If you find a vulnerability or potential vulnerability in OpenTofu, please follow the Security Policy for reporting it. The project uses the Mozilla Public License v2.0.

For more information about OpenTofu, you can visit their Manifesto and their About page. You can also join their Slack community or check out their weekly status updates on the project’s GitHub repository.

The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of OpenTofu, an open-source alternative to Terraform’s infrastructure as code provisioning tool. OpenTofu was created in response to Terraform’s recent license change, which raised concerns within the open-source community. OpenTofu is community-driven, impartial, layered, modular, and backward-compatible. It has received support from industry leaders and has formal pledges from over 140 organizations and 600 individuals. The Linux Foundation emphasizes the importance of open collaboration and innovation in the infrastructure as code field.

OpenTofu aims to be a reliable, accessible, and truly open-source solution.

Source: Linux Foundation.