Tofu

The description of the BSL license as “faux-source” I ran across in this article about the saga of Terraform is perfect. It also speaks well about the the capability of OpenTofu as a replacement for Terraform. I haven’t done much with it recently, but early signs were very encouraging. It’s very unclear what IBM’s intention is with the aquisition of Terraform. Maybe they will even change the license back and remerge with OpenTofu?

I did a little bit more testing with OpenTofu today. This time with LXD. There was a new alpha version of OpenTofu released to fix a bug so I installed that one to keep current. I didn’t encounter the bug although I did use the sensitive variable tag. An init, plan, apply and destroy loop worked flawlessly with the following simple LXD configuration: terraform { required_providers { lxd = { source = "terraform-lxd/lxd" } } } resource "lxd_instance" "tofu1" { name = "tofu1" image = "ubuntu:22.

I created a very simple project to test out the alpha release of OpenTofu using the Hetzner Cloud Provider. I figure many people are looking at the common providers like AWS and Azure, so I thought it would be interesting to check out something different. The first alpha release installed from a .deb file on Ubuntu 22.04 without issue. This release references the new registry amongst other things. I ran tofu init without any issues:

As I said I would do a few days back, I gave OpenTofu a try on one of my old Terraform projects. The TLDR; is that it worked without any changes to the existing scripts. The first step was downloading and building it on my ancient MacBook. The instructions to build the source code were easy to follow and it didn’t take too long to get it running. After that, it was a matter of getting an updated API key for Hetzner Cloud and creating a terraform.

The open-source fork of the now not open source Terraform called OpenTofu is getting close to operational readiness. It is being run by The Linux Foundation and has the backing of a number of companies and people. From what I can tell, the only thing missing right now is the registry for Terraform providers. I’m sure a new registry will be available soon and then it’s off to the races. I’m planning on revisiting a couple of the things I’ve done with Terraform over the past few years to see what, if any changes, are required to make them go.