Could the key to gaining an administrator’s favor these days be through a visual interface? The OpenTofu project hopes so.
The Linux Foundation’s open source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool has gotten a visual interface for its component registry, courtesy of IaC platform provider Spacelift and other volunteers.
OpenTofu has also established an Application Programming Interface (API — now in Beta), for programmatic access to the registry, which is hosted, gratis, by Cloudflare.
For many users of OpenTofu — and HashiCorp Terraform from which it was forked — learn about the capabilities of IaC directly through reading the documentation found in a registry.
“When I am writing IaC, I always go to the IaC’s documentation to understand how that particular resource works, and to implement the best practices around it,” noted Wojciech Barczynski, Spacelift engineering vice president, and member of the OpenTofu Technical Steering Committee, in a Thursday blog post.
The Importance of a Registry
A good registry should be as “a one-stop shop for every detail of the resources that can be created,” Barczynski wrote.
If done properly, a registry entry eliminates the need for tracking down the original documentation, and may even spark the imagination of what can be done.
In the blog post, Barczynski noted that when he worked at the major cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure), it was the documentation in the Terraform registry — rather than the official cloud docs — that provided more useful information about how the basic cloud components worked.
A solid registry could go a long way in helping further adoption of OpenTofu, he wrote.
Building a Registry
In August 2023, HashiCorp changed the licensing of its core products, including the Terraform infrastructure management software, from an open source license to the more restrictive Business Source License (BSL). This concerned a number of third-party Terraform support providers and other active users into forking the last open source version of Terraform into OpenTofu, which was soon adopted by the Linux Foundation as a supported open source project.
HashiCorp also restricted the use of the Terraform Registry so that it could only be used with Terraform itself, so the OpenTofu project set off to build its own registry as well, releasing an alpha version in October, and then embarking on a more formal design, one based on Homebrew central repository and package manager for Apple Macintosh.
The first version of the registry was released with version 1.6 of OpenTofu, and the first version of the fork released in January. That iteration of the registry, however, included only a command line interface.
Nonetheless, it proved to be a success. Overall, The module registry currently hosts 30,000 modules from 4,000 contributors. The registry has already proven popular with developers, attracting over 1.8 million daily requests, a 30% increase from three months prior.
Details About the Registry
“Having a registry is useful, but having a UI for it takes it to the next level,” Barczynski wrote. “Before the registry UI, engineers were required to consult other documentation sources for building OpenTofu automation, which could’ve made the process cumbersome, especially for those who are not that familiar with how OpenTofu works.”
The registry provides information on both OpenTofu providers (such as Spacelift) as well as documentation of cloud and on-prem capabilities that can be incorporated into an OpenTofu project.
Each entry includes information on how to deploy the provider’s service, along with examples and common configuration values, as well as any related schemas and import directions.
The project refuses to scrape information from the Terraform registry, or elsewhere, without the owner’s permission. So not all modules are fully filled out yet, though the “majority” of modules are documented, Barczynski noted.
API Access as Well
For those who would rather access the registry programmatically, OpenTofu also offers an API, via api.opentofu.org (though this address may change), and is based on the OpenAPI spec.
The maintainers plan to discuss this and other advances at OpenTofu Day, which will be held the week of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation‘s KubeCon+CloudNativeCon, happening in Salt Lake City, Nov. 12-15.
The post OpenTofu Registry Gets a User Interface — and an API appeared first on The New Stack.
The maintainers of the Linux Foundation's OpenTofu hope the visual interface for its component registry will spur more adoption of the Infrastructure as Code tool.