CDK Terrain with Terraform

Notes

This example is the Terraform track of the Deploy AWS CDK and CDK Terrain with lifecycle hooks tutorial. CDK Terrain is the community fork of CDK for Terraform (CDKTF), which HashiCorp deprecated; it keeps the same construct model and lets you define Terraform configuration in a general-purpose language. A TypeScript Terrain app in components/terraform/greeting/ declares an AWS provider and one aws_ssm_parameter. The project file is still named cdktf.json in this Terrain release, a holdover from CDKTF. The component's synth hook installs dependencies when package-lock.json changed or the CLI is missing, then runs npm run synth before init, plan, and apply, so Terraform always reads a freshly generated cdk.tf.json, a Terraform configuration in JSON syntax. No CloudFormation is involved; Terraform state tracks the resource directly.

The local stack declares a Floci AWS emulator and an aws/emulator identity in atmos.yaml wires the AWS provider to it, so no AWS account is needed. Remove that identity and the emulator import to deploy to a real account.

The companion cdk-cloudformation example creates the same kind of resource from an AWS CDK app through Atmos's native CloudFormation component.

Requirements: Node.js 22.19.0 or later (CDK Terrain's minimum), npm, Terraform or OpenTofu, and Docker or Podman for the emulator.

Usage

atmos validate stacks
atmos emulator up aws -s local
atmos terraform plan greeting -s local
atmos terraform apply greeting -s local
atmos terraform output greeting -s local
atmos terraform destroy greeting -s local
atmos emulator down aws -s local

Change vars.message and plan again to see the regenerated configuration. To apply a saved plan with its original generated files, run atmos terraform apply greeting -s local --from-plan --skip-hooks=synth.

Run the whole lifecycle with atmos test.