OpenTofu: Open Source Infrastructure as Code Tool

OpenTofu is an open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool and a fork of Terraform. It was created in 2023, after HashiCorp moved Terraform from the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 2.0 to the Business Source License (BSL). OpenTofu is developed under the Linux Foundation, stays on MPL 2.0 and uses the same HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), the same state format and the same provider protocol.

For teams that care about license clarity or vendor neutrality, that compatibility is the main point. Existing configurations, modules and providers such as hashicorp/azurerm usually work unchanged, because OpenTofu resolves them from its own registry. Migrating is often a matter of swapping the binary and running tofu init, but check the migration guide for the Terraform version you come from.

Key Areas

Compatibility: The tofu CLI mirrors the terraform commands (init, plan, apply), so pipelines and habits carry over. The two projects have diverged since the fork, so features added to either one after 2023 are not guaranteed to exist in the other.

OpenTofu-specific features: OpenTofu added capabilities that Terraform does not offer in the same form, for example client-side state encryption and early evaluation of variables in backend and module source configuration.

Ecosystem: The OpenTofu registry serves providers and modules. For Azure work, the AzureRM and AzAPI providers are available there.

OpenTofu belongs to the Infrastructure as Code practice and to the open source ecosystem. Most content tagged Terraform applies here as well, and it is commonly used for Azure deployments in CI/CD pipelines. The OpenTofu documentation is the primary reference.

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