Installing OpenTofu & the tofu CLI

A drop-in for the terraform command.

OpenTofu ships a single static binary called tofu, and the CLI is a deliberate mirror of terraform — same subcommands, same flags, same output. If you know terraform init / plan / apply, you already know tofu. Install it from the OpenTofu releases, a package manager, or the official install script; on CI, pin the version like any other tool.

# install (one option — see opentofu.org for your platform)
$ brew install opentofu
$ tofu version
OpenTofu v1.8.2
on darwin_arm64
 
$ tofu -help | head -6      # the same subcommands as terraform
Usage: tofu [global options] <subcommand> [args]
  init      Prepare your working directory for other commands
  plan      Show changes required by the current configuration
  apply     Create or update infrastructure

Drop-in usage

Point tofu at an existing Terraform directory and it just works: it reads the same .tf files, downloads the same providers, and uses the same .terraform working directory conventions. Many teams alias terraform=tofu during a transition so muscle memory and scripts keep working while they switch.

$ cd my-terraform-project
$ tofu init          # reads the same .tf, downloads the same providers
$ tofu plan          # identical plan output to terraform
$ tofu apply