Terraform to OpenTofu - Guide

Intro So, you decided to make the big leap and migrate your IaC framework from Terraform to OpenTofu. In this short blog article, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to do it — honestly, it’s much easier than you would imagine. For all versions lower than 1.6, OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform. It already becomes dependent on using various features as you progress through the versions. The technical side of the migration is quite trivial; instead of running the terraform command, all you have to do is run the tofu command. Let’s start with what a migration looks like. The Migration Procedure Let’s assume I have a directory with Terraform code that manages some resources in my staging account. Up until now, I used the terraform command to run this code. Before moving to OpenTofu, I want to make sure my code is still valid and I don’t have any drifts. So, the first step would be to run the terraform init command to get things going. Now I’m going to run terraform apply just to make sure that there are no drifts and that my code perfectly represents my running resources. Ok, the big moment has arrived. I’m going to switch my IaC engine to OpenTofu

May 8, 2025 - 15:01
 0
Terraform to OpenTofu - Guide

Intro

So, you decided to make the big leap and migrate your IaC framework from Terraform to OpenTofu.

In this short blog article, we’ll provide a step-by-step guide on how to do it — honestly, it’s much easier than you would imagine.

For all versions lower than 1.6, OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform. It already becomes dependent on using various features as you progress through the versions. The technical side of the migration is quite trivial; instead of running the terraform command, all you have to do is run the tofu command.

Let’s start with what a migration looks like.

The Migration Procedure

  1. Let’s assume I have a directory with Terraform code that manages some resources in my staging account. Up until now, I used the terraform command to run this code. Before moving to OpenTofu, I want to make sure my code is still valid and I don’t have any drifts. So, the first step would be to run the terraform init command to get things going.

Step 1:make sure my code is still valid

  1. Now I’m going to run terraform apply just to make sure that there are no drifts and that my code perfectly represents my running resources.

Step 2:terraform apply

  1. Ok, the big moment has arrived. I’m going to switch my IaC engine to OpenTofu