Basic CLI Features
The command line interface to OpenTofu is the tofu
command, which
accepts a variety of subcommands such as tofu init
or tofu plan
.
To view a list of the commands available in your current OpenTofu version,
run tofu
with no additional arguments:
(The output from your current OpenTofu version may be different than the above example.)
To get specific help for any specific command, use the -help
option with the
relevant subcommand. For example, to see help about the "validate" subcommand
you can run tofu validate -help
.
The inline help built in to OpenTofu CLI describes the most important characteristics of each command. For more detailed information, refer to each command's page for details.
Switching working directory with -chdir
The usual way to run OpenTofu is to first switch to the directory containing
the .tf
files for your root module (for example, using the cd
command), so
that OpenTofu will find those files automatically without any extra arguments.
In some cases though — particularly when wrapping OpenTofu in automation
scripts — it can be convenient to run OpenTofu from a different directory than
the root module directory. To allow that, OpenTofu supports a global option
-chdir=...
which you can include before the name of the subcommand you intend
to run:
The chdir
option instructs OpenTofu to change its working directory to the
given directory before running the given subcommand. This means that any files
that OpenTofu would normally read or write in the current working directory
will be read or written in the given directory instead.
There are two exceptions where OpenTofu will use the original working directory
even when you specify -chdir=...
:
-
Settings in the CLI Configuration are not for a specific subcommand and OpenTofu processes them before acting on the
-chdir
option. -
In case you need to use files from the original working directory as part of your configuration, a reference to
path.cwd
in the configuration will produce the original working directory instead of the overridden working directory. Usepath.root
to get the root module directory.
Shell Tab-completion
If you use either bash
or zsh
as your command shell, OpenTofu can provide
tab-completion support for all command names and some command arguments.
To add the necessary commands to your shell profile, run the following command:
After installation, it is necessary to restart your shell or to re-read its profile script before completion will be activated.
To uninstall the completion hook, assuming that it has not been modified manually in the shell profile, run the following command: