OpenTofu
Hosted by the Linux Foundation
OpenTofu is an open source, community-governed fork of Terraform that provides infrastructure-as-code tooling for defining and provisioning cloud and on-premises resources using a declarative configuration language.
Definition
OpenTofu is an open source, community-governed fork of Terraform that provides infrastructure-as-code tooling for defining and provisioning cloud and on-premises resources using a declarative configuration language.
Overview
OpenTofu was created in 2023 after HashiCorp changed Terraform's license from the open source Mozilla Public License to the more restrictive Business Source License (BSL). A group of companies and contributors that relied on Terraform remaining truly open source forked the last MPL-licensed version of Terraform's codebase and formed OpenTofu, which is now hosted under the Linux Foundation for neutral, community-based governance. Because it forked directly from Terraform, OpenTofu is largely compatible with existing Terraform configurations, providers, and state files, aiming to be a near drop-in replacement for teams that want to keep using the same HCL-based infrastructure-as-code workflow without being tied to HashiCorp's licensing terms. It supports the same core workflow — write declarative resource definitions, plan changes, apply them — against providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hundreds of other services. Since the fork, OpenTofu has continued independent development, adding features requested by its community that diverge somewhat from Terraform's own roadmap, while both projects remain conceptually similar tools for managing infrastructure as code, a topic covered in SkillVeris's Terraform & Infrastructure as Code course and the blog post Infrastructure as Code Explained: Terraform Basics.
Key Features
- Fork of Terraform's last MPL-licensed codebase, remaining fully open source
- Governed by the Linux Foundation under open, community-based processes
- Broad compatibility with existing Terraform configurations, state, and providers
- Declarative HCL-based configuration for defining infrastructure resources
- Support for the standard plan/apply workflow across major cloud providers
- Independent feature development driven by community proposals