DEV Community

Chris Lewis
Chris Lewis

Posted on

Prettyplan: an open-source Terraform formatting tool for devs

tl;dr: prettyplan is an online tool where you can paste in your output from terraform plan and see it presented in an easy-to-read tabulated format. It is available here!

I'm not sure how many people here use Terraform - a popular infrastructure-as-code tool - but if you have, you may have run into trouble before when trying to read its command-line output when working with large projects.

The default output that Terraform provides to let you know what changes it will make is pretty good, but in some cases it can be quite difficult to read... for example, consider trying to read what has changed here:

terraform console output

To help with this, I created prettyplan: a small web app that parses your Terraform output and presents it in a much easier to read tabulated format. It's been a fun project to work on and one that I hope can help other devs too.

With prettyplan, the previous example looks like this instead:

prettyplan formatted output

Which (at least to me) looks a lot nicer and easier to manage! So if you've found yourself reading through that kind of console output before, give it a shot. :)

Contributions

If prettyplan is useful to you and you're interested in contributing, getting started and making changes is quite simple as the project is currently all vanilla JS with no dependencies or build (with the exception of some unit tests that run on commit). I welcome any improvements that people think could be made!

Oldest comments (0)