Many organizations rely on OpenTofu for their infrastructure provisioning. However, many of them don’t even realize that some tools out there that can easily improve their infrastructure management with OpenTofu. While OpenTofu itself handles tasks like creating instances, networks, and storage buckets, without the right set of complementary tools and practices, teams may miss out on the full benefits of OpenTofu.

For example, when teams use OpenTofu to deploy resources to their infrastructure, they often don’t have a clear picture of the actual costs until these resources are finally deployed to the cloud. This can result in unexpected and sometimes expensive cloud bills, especially in large environments with lots of resources and services. Even a single misconfigured instance or an unused resource left running can easily raise the costs for the organization.

On top of that, without the right security tools, teams might ignore some issues like S3 buckets that are publicly accessible or security groups that allow inbound traffic to resources like databases or instances. These issues can easily expose data such as customer details, API keys, or even login credentials, leaving your infrastructure vulnerable.

In this blog, we’ll cover ten useful tools that can improve your OpenTofu workflows. These tools assist with tasks like security checks, cost estimation, policy enforcement, and optimizing OpenTofu’s capabilities. Without these tools, teams would need to manually create the logic or write custom scripts to handle these tasks.

Whether you’re managing a small project or scaling up for larger ones, these tools can make your OpenTofu setup more powerful and easier to manage. Now, let’s take a closer look at these tools and see how they can help you improve your OpenTofu setup.

Terraform-docs

The first tool on the list is Terraform-docs, and for good reason. When you’re working with OpenTofu or any other IAC tool, clear and consistent documentation or Readme often gets overlooked by most of the developers. Terraform-docs solves this problem by generating documentation straight from your OpenTofu configuration files, making it easier for all the DevOps teams to understand, and maintain their infrastructure.

Most of the DevOps teams struggle to write detailed documentation for each and every module. Over time, this can cause a lot of confusion within the team, especially when new team members join or when you need to work on some older projects. Terraform-docs removes the guesswork by pulling details like input variables, output values, and dependencies from your OpenTofu code and turning them into simple, easy-to-read documentation.

Let’s say you’ve built a module to set up an Amazon RDS database. This module might use variables like db_instance_class, allocated_storage, and engine_version. Without proper documentation, someone on your team might not know which variables are required, what their purpose is, or what default values are used if none are provided.

Terraform-docs solves this by generating a table that looks like this:

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This documentation simplifies understanding of what the module requires. For example, users can easily identify that modifying the allocated_storage variable changes the database's storage size, while the rds_endpoint output provides the connection endpoint for the database.

Tenv

Continuing from where Terraform-docs makes your modules easier to document, another tool that simplifies working with OpenTofu is Tenv. Managing different versions of OpenTofu across multiple projects can become a bit difficult, especially when one project needs an older version, and another needs to install a newer one. Tenv makes this process much easier by allowing you to easily switch between OpenTofu versions without any confusion.

With Tenv, you can install, remove, and switch between OpenTofu versions directly from your terminal without having to deal with binaries or paths. This is especially useful in scenarios where teams work on projects that rely on specific versions of OpenTofu for compatibility.

For example, imagine you’re managing two projects; one uses OpenTofu v1.8.6, while another is testing a newer v1.9.0-alpha2. Instead of downloading or replacing binaries for each version, Tenv gives you a simple interface to pick the version you need. You can easily set up your environment to match the requirements of a specific project.

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For teams handling multiple environments or experimenting with new features, Tenv is a must-have tool. It keeps your OpenTofu setup clean and organized, allowing you to focus on what matters the most.

Tflint

Now, moving on to the next tool, Tflint offers an important feature to optimize your OpenTofu workflow: linting. Tflint scans your OpenTofu configurations for issues before they reach the production environment. It helps identify some common mistakes made by most of the developers or infrastructure engineers, such as missing version constraints for providers, missing required version attributes for OpenTofu itself, or any other errors within your configuration that could cause problems down the line.

For example, Tflint flags warnings about the missing required_version attribute and the absence of a version constraint for the provider. These are precisely the types of issues detected that can easily lead to deployment errors, compatibility problems, or even security vulnerabilities.

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With Tflint, you can automate the linting process, making sure that every OpenTofu configuration is thoroughly checked before it's deployed to the cloud. This is especially helpful in large-scale projects, where it’s easier to miss this kind of mistake as the project scales.

Tfsec

Moving on to the next tool, tfsec is another must-have addition to your OpenTofu toolkit, designed for security scanning. It helps you identify security vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in your OpenTofu code before deployment.

While OpenTofu is excellent for managing infrastructure, security problems can sometimes be overlooked, especially in large projects where resources are added or modified frequently. tfsec helps by scanning your OpenTofu configuration files and finding possible security issues, like resources that are exposed to the public, security groups that are too open, or IAM roles that are not set up correctly.

For example, if your OpenTofu configuration contains a security group rule that allows unrestricted access from the internet (0.0.0.0/0), tfsec will flag this as a security issue. In this case, the tool will alert you that your port is exposed to the internet and suggest that you should set a more restrictive CIDR range for better security.

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With tfsec, you can make sure that your OpenTofu infrastructure is secure, making it a must-have tool for any DevOps team looking to secure their infrastructure.

Checkov

Next, we have Checkov, a tool that helps you check your OpenTofu configurations for security and compliance issues. It automatically scans your code and finds problems that could cause security risks or violate best practices.

In larger projects, it’s easy to overlook security concerns as resources are frequently added or modified. Checkov makes it easier to catch these issues early on, by scanning for things like exposed S3 buckets. It can also find IAM roles with excessive permissions, helping to avoid any kind of misconfiguration.

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By using Checkov, you make sure that your infrastructure is not only secure but also follows the best practices.

OPA

Another great tool to use with OpenTofu is Open Policy Agent (OPA). OPA helps enforce rules and policies on your OpenTofu configurations, making sure that your infrastructure is both secure and compliant with your industry’s standards. With OPA, you can automatically validate your configuration files against some predefined rules defined in a Rego file before deploying them to the cloud.

Let’s say you need to make sure that all S3 buckets within your infrastructure are encrypted. OPA can enforce this rule by flagging any bucket configuration that does not enable encryption. Similarly, if your organization has a policy to restrict public access to some specific resources, OPA can identify and block configurations that violate this rule.

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You can use OPA locally to test configurations or integrate it into your CI/CD pipelines to automatically validate any type of code changes. This ensures that your infrastructure always meets organizational standards and avoids any costly or insecure OpenTofu misconfigurations from being deployed.

For teams managing multiple environments or following some strict rules, OPA is a powerful tool for them. It helps to make sure that your OpenTofu setup is safe, reliable, and follows your organization’s predefined policies.

Infracost

By now, we've talked about documentation, versions, security, and compliance. The next tool that can help improve your OpenTofu workflow is Infracost.

Infracost helps you estimate the cost of your OpenTofu resources before you apply any changes to the infrastructure. This way, you can prevent unexpected charges in your cloud bill. It works by analyzing your OpenTofu plan and providing a detailed cost breakdown of the cloud resources you’re about to deploy.

For example, if you're using an S3 bucket, Infracost will show the cost for storage, requests, and data transfer. You’ll get an estimate for each resource, helping you manage your budget more effectively.

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Infracost also supports various CI/CD integrations, allowing you to post cost estimates within pull requests automatically. This will help your team to stay informed, as costs can be reviewed and discussed directly within the workflow, giving your team better control over your infrastructure spending.

Stakpak

Now that we've covered some useful tools for OpenTofu let's take a look at Stakpak. Stakpak is a DevOps IDE with AI that helps you easily generate and modify your infrastructure code.

With Stakpak, you can easily create and change your infrastructure code using a simple and easy-to-use interface. It helps you visualize your infrastructure so you can see how everything is connected. You can modify existing code and make changes as needed.

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Stakpak also lets you import unlimited IaC projects so you can manage all your configurations in one place. You can create new modules, update old ones, and even publish both public and private modules. Plus, it automatically generates the necessary documentation for you as well.

In short, Stakpak makes it easy to build, update, and manage your OpenTofu infrastructure with a smart and simple interface.

OpenTofu Registry

We’ve covered a variety of useful tools so far, and now let’s talk about the OpenTofu Registry. The OpenTofu Registry is a central hub for managing and sharing OpenTofu modules and providers. It’s especially helpful for those new to the OpenTofu.

A key feature of the OpenTofu Registry is its collection of predefined modules and providers, complete with documentation. This helps DevOps engineers understand how to use and integrate modules by showing details like inputs, outputs, and dependencies as well.

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The registry also allows you to store and organize your infrastructure modules, making it easy to share resources and collaborate with your team. It provides a simple user interface and an API to manage your modules efficiently.

In short, the OpenTofu Registry is a central place to find, share, and manage OpenTofu modules, with built-in documentation to simplify the process.

Terrateam

Now, the last tool on our list, but not least, is Terrateam. Terrateam works with GitHub to help you manage your OpenTofu configurations directly through pull requests. This means you can handle your infrastructure changes right alongside your code, making it easier for teams already using GitHub.

What makes Terrateam useful is that it offers many features in one place. You can add Checkov and OPA for security checks to make sure your infrastructure is safe. It also provides cost estimation so you can see how much your resources will cost before deploying them.

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Terrateam combines tools around security, cost management, and automation in one place. It makes managing OpenTofu with GitHub easier and even more efficient.

In short, Terrateam helps you manage, deploy, and secure OpenTofu configurations directly from GitHub. You can learn more about Terrateam from here.

Conclusion

By now, you should have a good idea of the best tools to improve your OpenTofu setup. These tools help with things like documentation, security, cost management, and following security rules. Using them can make your work with OpenTofu easier, safer, and more cost-effective.

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