Install opentofu with Homebrew, apk, chocolatey, dnf, Nix, pacman, zypper, scoop, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• tofu

Project history

The OpenTF manifesto began as an appeal to keep Terraform under a truly open-source license. When that did not happen, the initiative forked the last MPL-licensed Terraform codebase and moved forward as OpenTofu under the Linux Foundation. The project’s own announcement framed OpenTofu as community-driven, impartial, layered, modular, and backward-compatible.

OpenTofu reached its first stable release, 1.6.0, on January 10, 2024, after roughly four months of work. The project documented migration paths from Terraform 1.5.x and 1.6.x and positioned the release as production-ready for users who wanted open-source infrastructure-as-code continuity.

Adoption history

OpenTofu adoption was unusually fast because it started with Terraform’s established user model, provider ecosystem, and module habits. The Linux Foundation launch announcement named broad community and company backing, while the OpenTofu homepage later described thousands of providers and modules available to users.

The package-manager story matters because OpenTofu’s promise is partly operational: users need a `tofu` binary in CI images, developer laptops, container builds, and distribution repositories. Homebrew, Nix, Alpine, Fedora, Arch, Scoop, Chocolatey, winget, and other package channels made the fork installable without bespoke bootstrapping.

How it is used

Operators use OpenTofu to declare infrastructure resources, initialize providers and modules, compute plans, apply changes, manage state, and integrate infrastructure changes into CI/CD. It is intentionally familiar to Terraform users, with migration guides focused on preserving existing workflows and configurations.

The CLI reads configuration files, talks to provider plugins, stores state locally or remotely, and exposes command behavior that infrastructure teams script heavily. That makes packaging details such as executable name, plugin cache behavior, credentials files, and compatibility promises more important than for a throwaway CLI.

Why package nerds care

OpenTofu is one of the clearest examples of licensing changing a package graph. A single upstream license decision created a new binary, new governance, new release channel, and new distro formulas for a tool already embedded in deployment pipelines.

Timeline

• 2023-08: the OpenTF manifesto objected to Terraform’s license change and proposed an open-source path.
• 2023-09-20: the Linux Foundation announced OpenTofu as an open-source Terraform fork.
• 2024-01-10: OpenTofu 1.6.0 became the first stable release.
• 2024-01-10: the Linux Foundation announced OpenTofu general availability.

Related projects

• Related projects include Terraform, the OpenTofu provider registry ecosystem, HCL, Terragrunt, Atlantis, Spacelift, env0, and CI/CD systems that run infrastructure plans as part of deployment workflows.

Sources

• https://opentofu.org/
• https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-announces-fork-of-terraform/
• https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-is-going-ga/
• https://opentofu.org/docs/v1.6/intro/migration/terraform-1.6/
• https://opentofu.org/manifesto/
• https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-opentofu
• https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/opentofu-announces-general-availability