Install org-formation with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• aws-organization-formation
• ofn
• org-formation

Project history

The org-formation-cli repository was created on 2019-08-22. The project emerged in the period when AWS Organizations and multi-account landing zones were becoming ordinary cloud architecture, but many account and policy changes were still performed through consoles or bespoke scripts.

Its README presents three central features: IaC for AWS Organizations resources, CloudFormation annotations for cross-account provisioning, and automation of account creation and resource provisioning. The docs describe organization.yml templates containing Accounts, OUs, SCPs, and root-account metadata.

Adoption history

AWS's Open Source Blog published a 2020 series on managing AWS Organizations with org-formation, describing it as an open-source, community-supported tool for managing different aspects of AWS Organizations through IaC. That coverage helped place the package in the AWS multi-account governance ecosystem rather than only in its GitHub niche.

The GitHub repository shows meaningful operator adoption for a specialized cloud-governance CLI, with more than a thousand stars and topics covering AWS, Control Tower, landing zones, organizations, CloudFormation, and DevOps.

How it is used

Typical use starts with org-formation init organization.yml, which creates a local organization-formation file and an S3-backed state file. Operators then run update or change-set commands to apply changes to accounts, OUs, service control policies, and related resources.

Teams use the tool in CI/CD to review and apply AWS Organizations changes from source control. The README also documents Docker usage that mounts local AWS credentials, reflecting a common operational pattern for high-privilege organization-management tooling.

Why package nerds care

org-formation is significant because it packages AWS Organizations governance as a normal CLI with npm, Docker, and Homebrew entry points. It turns a high-privilege, account-wide administrative workflow into an installable developer tool with templates, task files, and repeatable command semantics.

For package metadata, it is a good example of an IaC package whose executable names differ across distributions: aws-organization-formation on npm, org-formation and ofn as CLIs, and org-formation as the Homebrew formula.

Timeline

• 2019-08-22: org-formation/org-formation-cli repository created on GitHub.
• 2020-08: AWS Open Source Blog published its org-formation walkthrough series.
• 2024-02: GitHub release pages show v1.0.x maintenance releases in the stable line.

Related projects

• Related AWS services include AWS Organizations, service control policies, CloudFormation, CodeCommit, CodePipeline, and Control Tower. The org-formation-reference repository provides a best-practices reference architecture for starting AWS Organizations with org-formation.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/org-formation/org-formation-cli
• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/managing-aws-organizations-using-the-open-source-org-formation-tool-part-1/
• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/org-formation
• https://github.com/org-formation/org-formation-cli
• https://github.com/org-formation/org-formation-cli/blob/master/docs/articles/aws-organizations.md
• https://github.com/org-formation/org-formation-cli/blob/master/docs/cli-reference.md
• https://github.com/org-formation/org-formation-reference