Terraform and OpenTofu Cookbook

Use tasks to keep infrastructure commands pointed at the same working directory. The recipe assumes a terraform/ directory containing your configuration and any provider credentials already configured in the environment.

Managing terraform/opentofu Projects

Terraform configuration often lives in a terraform/ subdirectory, which means running commands like terraform -chdir=terraform plan. The following config lets you invoke all of them through mise tasks instead.

[tools]
terraform = "1"

[tasks."terraform:init"]
description = "Initializes a Terraform working directory"
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform init"

[tasks."terraform:plan"]
description = "Generates an execution plan for Terraform"
depends = ["terraform:init"]
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform plan"

[tasks."terraform:apply"]
description = "Applies the changes required to reach the desired state of the configuration"
depends = ["terraform:init"]
interactive = true
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform apply"

[tasks."terraform:destroy"]
description = "Destroy Terraform-managed infrastructure"
depends = ["terraform:init"]
interactive = true
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform destroy"

[tasks."terraform:validate"]
description = "Validates the Terraform files"
depends = ["terraform:init"]
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform validate"

[tasks."terraform:format"]
description = "Formats the Terraform files"
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform fmt"

[tasks."terraform:format-check"]
description = "Check formatting without changing files"
run = "terraform -chdir=terraform fmt -check"

[tasks."terraform:check"]
description = "Check formatting and validate the configuration"
depends = ["terraform:format-check", "terraform:validate"]

Run mise run terraform:check for validation, then mise run terraform:plan to inspect proposed changes. terraform:format is the separate task that rewrites formatting. Initialization may download providers and update the dependency lockfile even when the selected task is a check.

terraform:apply and terraform:destroy retain Terraform's confirmation prompts; interactive = true gives those commands access to the terminal. This recipe does not save a plan file, so apply calculates its own plan before asking for approval.

For OpenTofu, replace the tool declaration with opentofu = "1" and the command name terraform with tofu. The terraform/ directory and task names can stay as they are, or be renamed to match your project.

If you use a local dotenv file for credentials, add env._.file explicitly. Keep plaintext credential files out of version control; see secrets for encrypted storage.