OpenTofu Announces General Availability

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12, 2024 — The OpenTofu community is excited to announce the general availability of OpenTofu, the open source fork of Terraform, now a production-ready project under the Linux Foundation. This milestone follows four months of development from over five dozen developers, offering a straightforward migration path for Terraform users.

“This OpenTofu GA release is the culmination of four months of worldwide community efforts across 5 continents, from hundreds of contributors and over five dozen developers,” said Sebastian Stadl, core OpenTofu contributor. “Now that we have a stable release out, the community can look forward to a quick succession of long awaited features and enhancements.”

The journey to this release highlights OpenTofu’s community-driven approach, and the value of open source. Two examples of this stand out:

• An RFC for client-side state encryption was submitted by a community member that tried to bring it to Terraform since 2016
• Multiple RFCs for the OpenTofu registry were submitted, leading to an architecture that is 10x faster and 10x cheaper to operate.

There are many features in OpenTofu 1.6 to look forward to, including:

• An advanced testing feature for improved stability in configurations and modules.
• Enhanced S3 state backend with new authentication methods, maintaining compatibility with S3-compatible storage.
• A new provider and module registry, offering a streamlined process for publishing via a simple pull request.
• Hundreds of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements.

The OpenTofu community continues to grow, with dozens of developers contributing, hundreds of active community members, thousands of Github followers, and tens of thousands of fans. The project is also supported by many corporate backers and technology partners, including CloudFlare, BuildKite, GitLab, and Oracle.

While the 1.6 release had the dual objectives of being released as early as possible, and as stable as possible, the upcoming OpenTofu 1.7 will introduce many more community requested features that are not available in Terraform, including and under consideration:

• Client-side state encryption, developed through community collaboration, and well suited for heightened security in regulated environments.
• Parameterizable backends, providers, and modules to enable more readable, DRY code.
• Third-party extensibility, with a plugin system for new state backends

With this release, OpenTofu is ready for production use. To learn more about OpenTofu, including how to get involved, contribute, and access their repository, please visit the OpenTofu website and GitHub.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the world’s leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world’s infrastructure, including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.

Source: The Linux Foundation