• Output OpenTofu Plan information into a merge request
• Configure OpenTofu report artifacts
  • Automatically configure OpenTofu report artifacts
  • Manually configure OpenTofu report artifacts

OpenTofu integration in merge requests

Collaborating around Infrastructure as Code (IaC) changes requires both code changes and expected infrastructure changes to be checked and approved. GitLab provides a solution to help collaboration around OpenTofu code changes and their expected effects using the merge request pages. This way users don’t have to build custom tools or rely on third-party solutions to streamline their IaC workflows.

Output OpenTofu Plan information into a merge request

Using the GitLab Terraform/OpenTofu Report artifact, you can expose details from tofu plan runs directly into a merge request widget, enabling you to see statistics about the resources that OpenTofu creates, modifies, or destroys.

Configure OpenTofu report artifacts

GitLab integrates with OpenTofu through the OpenTofu CI/CD component. This component uses GitLab-managed OpenTofu state to display OpenTofu changes on merge requests.

Automatically configure OpenTofu report artifacts

You should use the OpenTofu CI/CD component, which automatically configures the OpenTofu report artifacts in the plan jobs.

Manually configure OpenTofu report artifacts

For a quick setup, you should customize the pre-built image and rely on the gitlab-tofu helper.

To manually configure a GitLab OpenTofu Report artifact:

1. Define reusable variables to refer to these files multiple times:

   variables:
     PLAN: plan.cache
     PLAN_JSON: plan.json
   

2. Install jq, a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor.

3. Create an alias for a specific jq command that parses out the information you want to extract from the tofu plan output:

   before_script:
     - apk --no-cache add jq
     - alias convert_report="jq -r '([.resource_changes[]?.change.actions?]|flatten)|{\"create\":(map(select(.==\"create\"))|length),\"update\":(map(select(.==\"update\"))|length),\"delete\":(map(select(.==\"delete\"))|length)}'"
   

   In distributions that use Bash (for example, Ubuntu), alias statements are not expanded in non-interactive mode. If your pipelines fail with the error convert_report: command not found, alias expansion can be activated explicitly by adding a shopt command to your script:

   before_script:
     - shopt -s expand_aliases
     - alias convert_report="jq -r '([.resource_changes[]?.change.actions?]|flatten)|{\"create\":(map(select(.==\"create\"))|length),\"update\":(map(select(.==\"update\"))|length),\"delete\":(map(select(.==\"delete\"))|length)}'"
   

4. Define a script that runs tofu plan and tofu show. These commands pipe the output and convert the relevant bits into a store variable PLAN_JSON. This JSON is used to create a GitLab OpenTofu Report artifact. The OpenTofu report obtains a OpenTofu tfplan.json file. The collected OpenTofu plan report is uploaded to GitLab as an artifact, and is shown in merge requests.

   plan:
     stage: build
     script:
       - terraform plan -out=$PLAN
       - terraform show -json $PLAN | convert_report > $PLAN_JSON
     artifacts:
       reports:
         terraform: $PLAN_JSON
   

5. Run the pipeline to display the widget in the merge request, like this:

   

6. In the widget, select View Full Log to go to the plan output present in the pipeline logs: