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Terraform/OpenTofu

Atmos manages Terraform root modules as components, handling workspace selection, backend configuration, provider overrides, and variable generation.

Overview​

In Atmos, a Terraform component is a Terraform root module stored in your components/terraform/ directory. Atmos orchestrates these components by:

  • Generating variables from stack configurations into .tfvars files
  • Managing workspaces automatically based on stack context
  • Configuring backends for state storage
  • Generating providers with dynamic configurations
  • Orchestrating execution across multiple components and stacks
Disambiguation

  • Terraform Component is a Terraform Root Module stored typically in components/terraform/$name that consists of the resources defined in the .tf files in a working directory (e.g. components/terraform/infra/vpc)

  • Stack provides configuration (variables and other settings) for a Terraform Component and is defined in one or more Atmos stack manifests (a.k.a. stack config files)

Provisioning Components​

To provision a Terraform component using the atmos CLI:

atmos terraform plan eks --stack=ue2-dev
atmos terraform apply eks --stack=ue2-dev

where:

  • eks is the Terraform component to provision (from the components/terraform folder)
  • --stack=ue2-dev is the stack to provision the component into

Short versions of all command-line arguments can be used:

atmos terraform plan eks -s ue2-dev
atmos terraform apply eks -s ue2-dev

The atmos terraform deploy command executes terraform apply -auto-approve to provision components in stacks without user interaction:

atmos terraform deploy eks -s ue2-dev

Stack Configuration​

Configure Terraform components in your stack manifests:

components:
  terraform:
    vpc:
      metadata:
        type: real
        component: vpc
        inherits:
          - vpc-defaults
      vars:
        enabled: true
        name: primary
        cidr_block: "10.0.0.0/16"
      env:
        TF_LOG: INFO
      settings:
        spacelift:
          workspace_enabled: true

See Stack Configuration for the complete schema reference.

Using Submodules (Child Modules)​

If your components rely on local submodules, our convention is to use a modules/ subfolder of the component to store them.