local-exec Provisioner

The local-exec provisioner invokes a local executable after a resource is created. This invokes a process on the machine running OpenTofu, not on the resource. See the remote-exec provisioner to run commands on the resource.

Note that even though the resource will be fully created when the provisioner is run, there is no guarantee that it will be in an operable state - for example system services such as sshd may not be started yet on compute resources.

:::warning Important Use provisioners as a last resort. There are better alternatives for most situations. Refer to Declaring Provisioners for more details. :::

Example usage

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  # ...

  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "echo ${self.private_ip} >> private_ips.txt"
  }
}

Argument Reference

The following arguments are supported:

• command - (Required) This is the command to execute. It can be provided as a relative path to the current working directory or as an absolute path. It is evaluated in a shell, and can use environment variables or OpenTofu variables.

• working_dir - (Optional) If provided, specifies the working directory where command will be executed. It can be provided as a relative path to the current working directory or as an absolute path. The directory must exist.

• interpreter - (Optional) If provided, this is a list of interpreter arguments used to execute the command. The first argument is the interpreter itself. It can be provided as a relative path to the current working directory or as an absolute path. The remaining arguments are appended prior to the command. This allows building command lines of the form "/bin/bash", "-c", "echo foo". If interpreter is unspecified, sensible defaults will be chosen based on the system OS.

• environment - (Optional) block of key value pairs representing the environment of the executed command. inherits the current process environment.

• when - (Optional) If provided, specifies when OpenTofu will execute the command. For example, when = destroy specifies that the provisioner will run when the associated resource is destroyed. Refer to Destroy-Time Provisioners for details.

• quiet - (Optional) If set to true, OpenTofu will not print the command to be executed to stdout, and will instead print "Suppressed by quiet=true". Note that the output of the command will still be printed in any case.

Interpreter Examples

resource "terraform_data" "example1" {
  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "open WFH, '>completed.txt' and print WFH scalar localtime"
    interpreter = ["perl", "-e"]
  }
}

resource "terraform_data" "example2" {
  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "Get-Date > completed.txt"
    interpreter = ["PowerShell", "-Command"]
  }
}

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  # ...

  provisioner "local-exec" {
    command = "echo $FOO $BAR $BAZ >> env_vars.txt"

    environment = {
      FOO = "bar"
      BAR = 1
      BAZ = "true"
    }
  }
}