OpenTofu Has a Free Infrastructure as Code Tool — The Open-Source Terraform Fork

Terraform Changed Its License. OpenTofu Was Born.

In 2023, HashiCorp changed Terraform to a BSL license. The community forked it into OpenTofu — fully open source, Linux Foundation backed.

OpenTofu: Infrastructure as Code for Everyone

OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform. Same HCL language, same providers, same workflow.

Drop-In Replacement

# Replace terraform with tofu
alias terraform=tofu

# Everything works the same
tofu init
tofu plan
tofu apply

Your existing Terraform configs work with zero changes.

Define Infrastructure

# main.tf
resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t3.micro"

  tags = {
    Name = "web-server"
  }
}

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "assets" {
  bucket = "my-app-assets"
}

resource "aws_rds_instance" "db" {
  engine         = "postgres"
  engine_version = "16"
  instance_class = "db.t3.micro"
  allocated_storage = 20
}

tofu plan    # Preview changes
tofu apply   # Create infrastructure
tofu destroy # Tear it all down

Why Infrastructure as Code

1. Version Control Your Infra

Your infrastructure is in git. Review changes in PRs. Rollback with git revert.

2. Reproducible Environments

# Create staging identical to production
tofu workspace new staging
tofu apply -var="environment=staging"

3. Documentation by Default

The .tf files ARE the documentation. No wiki page that is 6 months out of date.

OpenTofu vs Terraform in 2026

Feature	OpenTofu	Terraform
License	MPL 2.0 (open)	BSL 1.1 (restricted)
Governance	Linux Foundation	HashiCorp
State encryption	Built-in	Enterprise only
Provider registry	OpenTofu + Terraform	Terraform
Community	Growing fast	Established
Compatibility	99.9%	Baseline

When to Use OpenTofu

• New projects (start with open source)
• Companies concerned about license changes
• Need state encryption (free in OpenTofu, paid in Terraform)

When to Stay on Terraform

• Terraform Cloud user (deep integration)
• Existing team already trained on Terraform
• Need Sentinel policies (HashiCorp-specific)

Install

# macOS
brew install opentofu

# Linux
curl -fsSL https://get.opentofu.org/install-opentofu.sh | sh

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