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Contributing to OpenTofu

Welcome and thank you for wanting to contribute!

In a hurry? Here's the short version:

⚠️ Important: Please avoid working on features or refactor without an accepted issue. OpenTofu is a large and complex project and every change needs careful consideration. We cannot merge non-bug pull requests without first having a discussion about them, no matter how trivial the issue may seem.

We specifically do not merge PRs without prior issues that:

  • Reformat code
  • Rename things
  • Move code around
  • Fix linter warnings for tools not currently in the CI pipeline
  • Add new CI tooling

Long version

This repository contains OpenTofu Core, which includes the command line interface, the main graph engine, and the documentation for them.

This document provides guidance on OpenTofu contribution recommended practices. It covers how to submit issues, how to get involved in the discussion, how to work on the code, and how to contribute code changes.

The easiest way to contribute is by opening an issue! Bug reports, broken compatibility reports, feature requests, old issue reposts, and well-prepared RFCs are all very welcome.

All major changes to OpenTofu Core go through the public RFC process, including those proposed by the core team. Thus, if you'd like to propose such a change, please prepare an RFC, so that the community can discuss the change and everybody has a chance to voice their opinion. You're also welcome to voice your own opinion on existing RFCs! You can find them by going to the issues view and filtering by the rfc label.

Generally, we appreciate external contributions very much and would love to work with you on them. However, please make sure to read the Contributing a Code Change section prior to making a contribution.

Core Team

The Core Team consists of the individuals in the MAINTAINERS file. This team exists as stewards of OpenTofu: to triage issues, to implement features, to help with and review community contributions, and to communicate with the Technical Steering Committee.

Issue Triaging

As issues are filed in the OpenTofu project, they go through a processes driven by the Core Team. This process is in place to prevent duplicate work and to ensure that a discussion happens before work is contributed to avoid frustration.

Steps:

  • Issue is filed and given the pending-decision label and an additional label to identify their type (bug, enhancement, rfc).
  • Issue will first be discussed between the Core Team and the community to iron out any missing details.
  • Once the Issue is well understood, the Core Team may decide to accept it, reject it, or pass the decision along to the Technical Steering Committee (pending-steering-committee-decision).
    • Occasionally, the Core Team may wait to make a decision to gauge the level of community interest and will add the label needs-community-input.
    • To advocate for an issue, give it a reaction and/or add a comment.
  • If Accepted:
    • It will have the pending-decision label removed and the accepted label added.
    • The Core Team may assign one of their members to work on it or may wait for a community member to ask for it to be assigned to them.
    • It may sometimes be labeled with help-wanted or good-first-issue when the Core Team hopes that someone in the community will be able to pitch in and help on it.
  • If Rejected:
    • Not all issues will make it into OpenTofu, but the decision process should be clear and documented.
    • The issue will be closed.

Contributing a Code Change

In order to contribute a code change, you should fork the repository, make your changes, and then submit a pull request. Crucially, all code changes should be preceded by an issue that you've been assigned to. If an issue for the change you'd like to introduce already exists, please communicate in the issue that you'd like to take ownership of it. If an issue doesn't yet exist, please create one expressing your interest in working on it and discuss it first, prior to working on the code. Code changes without a related issue will generally be rejected.

⚠️ Important: Please avoid working on features or refactor without an accepted issue. OpenTofu is a large and complex project and every change needs careful consideration. We cannot merge non-bug pull requests without first having a discussion about them, no matter how trivial the issue may seem.

In order for a code change to be accepted, you'll also have to accept the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO). It's very lightweight, and you can find it here. Accepting is accomplished by signing off on your commits, you can do this by adding a Signed-off-by line to your commit message, like here:

This is my commit message

Signed-off-by: Random Developer <random@developer.example.org>

Git has a built-in flag to append this line automatically:

~> git commit -s -m 'This is my commit message'

You can find more details about the DCO checker in the DCO app repo.

Additionally, please update the changelog if you're making any user-facing changes.

Working on the Code

If you wish to work on the OpenTofu CLI source code, you'll first need to install the Git version control system. Use Git to clone this repository into a location of your choice. OpenTofu uses Go Modules, and so you should not clone it inside your GOPATH.

After that, you can either install the Go compiler locally, or use Docker to build in a container. At this time the OpenTofu development environment targets only Linux and MacOS systems. While OpenTofu itself is compatible with Windows, unfortunately the unit test suite currently contains Unix-specific assumptions around maximum path lengths, path separators, etc. This means that using Docker is the best option if working on Windows.

If using Visual Studio Code or Goland/IntelliJ, a devcontainer is included which integrates directly with Docker. In Visual Studio Code, you can install the Remote Containers extension extension, then reopen the project to get a prompt about activating the devcontainer. In Goland/Intellij, open the .devcontainers.json file and click the purple cube icon that appears next to the line numbers to activate the dev container. At this point you can proceed as if building natively on Linux.

If not using the devcontainer (if using an incompatible IDE), you can still still build with Docker (and thus need not install any dependencies locally) by running docker commands directly. See the Building with Docker section.

Building Natively

Refer to the file .go-version to see which version of Go OpenTofu is currently built with. Other versions will often work, but if you run into any build or testing problems please try with the specific Go version indicated. You can optionally simplify the installation of multiple specific versions of Go on your system by installing goenv, which reads .go-version and automatically selects the correct Go version.

Build with Go

Switch into the root directory of the cloned repository and build OpenTofu using the Go toolchain in the standard way:

cd opentofu
go install ./cmd/tofu

The first time you run the go install command, the Go toolchain will download any library dependencies that you don't already have in your Go modules cache. Subsequent builds will be faster because these dependencies will already be available on your local disk.

Once the compilation process succeeds, you can find a tofu executable in the Go executable directory. If you haven't overridden it with the GOBIN environment variable, the executable directory is the bin directory inside the directory returned by the following command:

go env GOPATH

If you are planning to make changes to the OpenTofu source code, you should run the unit test suite before you start to make sure everything is initially passing:

go test ./...

As you make your changes, you can re-run the above command to ensure that the tests are still passing. If you are working only on a specific Go package, you can speed up your testing cycle by testing only that single package, or packages under a particular package prefix:

go test ./internal/command/...
go test ./internal/addrs

Building with Docker

The easiest way to get started with Docker on Windows and MacOS is using Docker Desktop, though other solutions exist. On Linux, follow the steps to install Docker Engine and run the post-installation steps. Then to build, run:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/usr/src/opentofu -w /usr/src/opentofu golang:1.20.7 GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go build -v -buildvcs=false .

Replace the values for GOOS snd GOARCH with those of your preferred target, e.g. GOOS=windows to build a Windows binary.

This will create the opentofu binary in the current working directory, which you can run with ./opentofu --version or move it to $PATH for Linux to find it running just opentofu --version.

Adding or updating dependencies

If you need to add or update dependencies, you'll have to make sure they use only approved and compatible licenses. The list of these licenses is defined in .licensei.toml.

To help verifying this in local development environment and in continuous integration, we use the licensei open source tool.

After modifying go.mod or go.sum files, you can run it manually with:

export GITHUB_TOKEN=changeme
make license-check

Note: you need to define the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable to a valid GitHub personal access token, or you will hit rate limiting from the GitHub API which licensei uses to discover the licenses of dependencies.

Acceptance Tests: Testing interactions with external services

OpenTofu's unit test suite is self-contained, using mocks and local files to help ensure that it can run offline and is unlikely to be broken by changes to outside systems.

However, several OpenTofu components interact with external services.

There are some optional tests in the OpenTofu CLI codebase that do interact with external services, which we collectively refer to as "acceptance tests". You can enable these by setting the environment variable TF_ACC=1 when running the tests. We recommend focusing only on the specific package you are working on when enabling acceptance tests, both because it can help the test run to complete faster and because you are less likely to encounter failures due to drift in systems unrelated to your current goal:

TF_ACC=1 go test ./internal/initwd

Because the acceptance tests depend on services outside of the OpenTofu codebase, and because the acceptance tests are usually used only when making changes to the systems they cover, it is common and expected that drift in those external systems will cause test failures. Because of this, prior to working on a system covered by acceptance tests it's important to run the existing tests for that system in an unchanged work tree first and respond to any test failures that preexist, to avoid misinterpreting such failures as bugs in your new changes.

Integration Tests: Testing interactions with external backends

OpenTofu supports various backends. We run integration test against them to ensure no side effects when using OpenTofu.

Execute to list all available commands to run tests:

make list-integration-tests

From the list of output commands, you can execute those which involve backends you intend to test against.

For example, execute the command to run integration tests with s3 backend:

make test-s3

Generated Code

Some files in the OpenTofu CLI codebase are generated. In most cases, we update these using go generate, which is the standard way to encapsulate code generation steps in a Go codebase.

go generate ./...

Use git diff afterwards to inspect the changes and ensure that they are what you expected.

OpenTofu includes generated Go stub code for the OpenTofu provider plugin protocol, which is defined using Protocol Buffers. Because the Protocol Buffers tools are not written in Go and thus cannot be automatically installed using go get, we follow a different process for generating these, which requires that you've already installed a suitable version of protoc:

make protobuf