Quick Start

Install Terragrunt

If you haven’t already installed Terragrunt, you can do so by following the instructions in the Install Terragrunt guide.

Add `terragrunt.hcl` to your project

If you are currently using OpenTofu or Terraform, and you want to start using Terragrunt in your project, simply run the following where your OpenTofu project is located:

touch terragrunt.hcl

This creates an empty Terragrunt configuration file in the directory where you are using OpenTofu. You can now start using terragrunt instead of tofu or terraform to run your OpenTofu/Terraform commands as if you were simply using OpenTofu or Terraform.

Depending on why you’re looking to adopt Terragrunt, this may be all you need to do!

With just this empty file, you’ve already made it so that you no longer need to run tofu init or terraform init before running tofu apply or terraform apply. Terragrunt will automatically run init for you if necessary. This is a feature called Auto-init.

This might not be very impressive so far, so you may be wondering why one might want to start using Terragrunt to manage their OpenTofu/Terraform projects. The next section will give you a very gentle introduction to using Terragrunt, and show you how you can start to leverage Terragrunt to manage your OpenTofu/Terraform projects more effectively.

Tutorial

What follows is a gentle step-by-step guide to integrating Terragrunt into a new (or existing) OpenTofu/Terraform project.

For the sake of this tutorial, a minimal set of OpenTofu configurations will be used so that you can follow along. Following these steps will give you an idea of how to integrate Terragrunt into an existing project, even if yours is more complex.

This tutorial will assume the following:

You have OpenTofu or Terraform installed*.
You have a basic understanding of what OpenTofu/Terraform do.
You are using a Unix-like operating system.

This tutorial will not assume the following:

You have any subscriptions to any cloud providers.
You have any experience with Terragrunt.
You have any existing Terragrunt, OpenTofu or Terraform projects.

* Note that if you have both OpenTofu and Terraform installed, you’ll want to read the tf-path docs to understand how Terragrunt determines which binary to use.

If you would like a less gentle introduction geared towards users with an active AWS account, familiarity with OpenTofu/Terraform, and potentially a team actively using Terragrunt, consider starting with the Overview.

If you start to feel lost, or don’t understand a concept, consider reading the Terminology page before continuing with this tutorial. It has a brief overview of most of the common terms used when discussing Terragrunt.

Finally, note that all of the files created in this tutorial can be copied directly from the code block, none of them are partial files, so you don’t have to worry about figuring out where to put the code. Just copy and paste!

You can also see what to expect in your filesystem at each step here.

Create a new Terragrunt project

Let’s say you have the following main.tf in directory foo:

resource "local_file" "file" {
  content  = "Hello, World!"
  filename = "${path.module}/hi.txt"
}

As we learned above, integrating this OpenTofu project with Terragrunt is as simple as creating a terragrunt.hcl file in the same directory:

touch foo/terragrunt.hcl

You can now run terragrunt commands within the foo directory, as if you were using tofu or terraform.

$ cd foo
$ terragrunt apply -auto-approve
18:44:26.066 STDOUT tofu: Initializing the backend...
18:44:26.067 STDOUT tofu: Initializing provider plugins...
18:44:26.067 STDOUT tofu: - Finding latest version of hashicorp/local...
18:44:26.717 STDOUT tofu: - Installing hashicorp/local v2.5.2...
18:44:27.033 STDOUT tofu: - Installed hashicorp/local v2.5.2 (signed, key ID 0C0AF313E5FD9F80)
18:44:27.033 STDOUT tofu: Providers are signed by their developers.
18:44:27.033 STDOUT tofu: If you'd like to know more about provider signing, you can read about it here:
18:44:27.033 STDOUT tofu: https://opentofu.org/docs/cli/plugins/signing/
18:44:27.034 STDOUT tofu: OpenTofu has created a lock file .terraform.lock.hcl to record the provider
18:44:27.034 STDOUT tofu: selections it made above. Include this file in your version control repository
18:44:27.034 STDOUT tofu: so that OpenTofu can guarantee to make the same selections by default when
18:44:27.034 STDOUT tofu: you run "tofu init" in the future.
18:44:27.034 STDOUT tofu: OpenTofu has been successfully initialized!
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu:
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu: You may now begin working with OpenTofu. Try running "tofu plan" to see
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu: any changes that are required for your infrastructure. All OpenTofu commands
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu: should now work.
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu: If you ever set or change modules or backend configuration for OpenTofu,
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu: rerun this command to reinitialize your working directory. If you forget, other
18:44:27.035 STDOUT tofu: commands will detect it and remind you to do so if necessary.
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu: OpenTofu used the selected providers to generate the following execution
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu: plan. Resource actions are indicated with the following symbols:
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:   + create
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu: OpenTofu will perform the following actions:
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:   # local_file.file will be created
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:   + resource "local_file" "file" {
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content              = "Hello, World!"
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content_base64sha256 = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content_base64sha512 = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content_md5          = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content_sha1         = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content_sha256       = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + content_sha512       = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + directory_permission = "0777"
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + file_permission      = "0777"
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + filename             = "./hi.txt"
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:       + id                   = (known after apply)
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:     }
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu: Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.
18:44:27.362 STDOUT tofu:
18:44:27.383 STDOUT tofu: local_file.file: Creating...
18:44:27.384 STDOUT tofu: local_file.file: Creation complete after 0s [id=0a0a9f2a6772942557ab5355d76af442f8f65e01]
18:44:27.392 STDOUT tofu:
18:44:27.392 STDOUT tofu: Apply complete! Resources: 1 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
18:44:27.392 STDOUT tofu:

You might notice that this is a little more verbose than the output you’re used to seeing from running tofu or terraform directly. This is because Terragrunt does a bit of work behind the scenes to make sure that you can scale your OpenTofu/Terraform usage without running into common problems. As you get more comfortable with using Terragrunt on larger projects, you may find the extra information helpful.

If you prefer that Terragrunt terminal output look more like that from tofu or terraform, you can use the --log-format bare flag (or set the environment variable TG_LOG_FORMAT=bare) to reduce the verbosity of the output.

e.g.

$ terragrunt --log-format bare apply
local_file.file: Refreshing state... [id=0a0a9f2a6772942557ab5355d76af442f8f65e01]

No changes. Your infrastructure matches the configuration.

OpenTofu has compared your real infrastructure against your configuration and
found no differences, so no changes are needed.

Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.

The way dynamicity is handled in OpenTofu is via variable configuration blocks. Let’s add one to our main.tf so that we can control the content of the file we’re creating:

variable "content" {}

resource "local_file" "file" {
  content  = var.content
  filename = "${path.module}/hi.txt"
}

Now, just like when using tofu alone, you can pass in the value for the content variable using the -var flag:

terragrunt apply -auto-approve -var content='Hello, Terragrunt!'

This is a common pattern when working with Infrastructure as Code (IaC). You typically create IaC that is relatively static, and then as you need to make configurations dynamic, you add variables to your configuration files to introduce dynamicity.

Add a new Terragrunt unit

In the context of Terragrunt, a “unit” is a directory that contains a terragrunt.hcl file, and it represents a single piece of infrastructure. You can think of a unit as a single instance of an OpenTofu/Terraform module.

Let’s create a copy of the foo directory and call it bar:
Terminal window
```
cd ..
cp -r foo bar
```
We now have two identical units in our project, foo and bar. We also have identical code in each of these directories, which is not ideal if we want to be able to avoid duplicating effort when we make changes to our infrastructure.
Create a shared module

To avoid this duplication, we can introduce a new shared directory, and reference that directory from both foo and bar. This way, we can make changes to our infrastructure in one place and have those changes apply to both units.

Let’s create a new directory called shared:
Terminal window
```
mkdir shared
```
Now, move the main.tf file from foo to shared:
Terminal window
```
mv foo/main.tf shared/main.tf
```
Finally, let’s update the foo and bar directories to reference the shared directory. Update the main.tf files in both foo and bar to look like this:
foo/main.tf
```
variable "content" {}

module "shared" {
  source = "../shared"

  content = var.content
}
```
bar/main.tf
```
variable "content" {}

module "shared" {
  source = "../shared"

  content = var.content
}
```
There’s now one place where the logic for the resource local_file.file is defined, and both foo and bar reference that logic. You can imagine that as your infrastructure grows, it can become more and more advantageous to put repeated logic into shared modules like this.

This setup does have some problems, however. While you could keep navigating to the different units and running terragrunt apply in each one with the appropriate -var flags, this can quickly become tedious, as you have to know which units require which set of vars applied. You might decide to work around this by creating a file named terraform.tfvars in each unit directory, but this also comes with some limitations that Terragrunt can help you avoid.
Use Terragrunt to manage your units

Luckily, Terragrunt has a built-in feature to control the inputs passed to your OpenTofu/Terraform configurations. This feature is called (aptly enough) inputs.

Let’s add inputs to both terragrunt.hcl files in the foo and bar directories:
foo/terragrunt.hcl
```
inputs = {
  content = "Hello from foo, Terragrunt!"
}
```
bar/terragrunt.hcl
```
inputs = {
  content = "Hello from bar, Terragrunt!"
}
```
You don’t have to maintain the extra main.tf files just to instantiate the module blocks. You can use the terraform block to handle this for you. Update the terragrunt.hcl files in foo and bar to look like this:
foo/terragrunt.hcl
```
terraform {
  source = "../shared"
}

inputs = {
  content = "Hello from foo, Terragrunt!"
}
```
bar/terragrunt.hcl
```
terraform {
  source = "../shared"
}

inputs = {
  content = "Hello from bar, Terragrunt!"
}
```
And you can delete the main.tf files from both foo and bar:
Terminal window
```
rm foo/main.tf bar/main.tf
```
This saves you some duplicated content, as you no longer need to maintain that extra content variable in each main.tf file. You can imagine that for especially large modules, the ability to define inputs in the terragrunt.hcl file can save you a lot of time and effort. The patterns for your infrastructure are exclusively defined in .tf files now, and the terragrunt.hcl files are used to manage the instances of those patterns as units.

If you run terragrunt apply -auto-approve in the foo and bar directories, you’ll see that the content variable is set to the value you defined in the inputs block of the terragrunt.hcl file. You might also notice that there’s now a special .terragrunt-cache directory generated for you in each unit directory. This is where Terragrunt copies the contents of modules, and performs any necessary additional code generation to make sure that your OpenTofu/Terraform code is ready to be run.

The .terragrunt-cache directory is typically added to .gitignore files, similar to the .terraform directory that OpenTofu generates.

Use Terragrunt to manage your stacks

In the context of Terragrunt, a “stack” is a collection of units that are managed together. You can think of a stack as a single environment, such as dev, staging, or prod, or an entire project.

One of the main reasons users adopt Terragrunt is that it can help manage the complexity of managing multiple units across multiple environments.

e.g. Let’s say we wanted to update both our foo and bar environments simultaneously.

In the directory above foo and bar, run the following:

$ terragrunt run-all apply
08:42:00.150 INFO   The stack at . will be processed in the following order for command apply:
Group 1
- Module ./bar
- Module ./foo


Are you sure you want to run 'terragrunt apply' in each folder of the stack described above? (y/n) y
08:43:10.702 STDOUT [foo] tofu: local_file.file: Refreshing state... [id=c4ae21736a6297f44ea86791e528338e9d14a0e9]
08:43:10.702 STDOUT [bar] tofu: local_file.file: Refreshing state... [id=f855394a0316da09618c8b1fde7b91e00e759f80]
08:43:10.708 STDOUT [bar] tofu: No changes. Your infrastructure matches the configuration.
08:43:10.708 STDOUT [bar] tofu: OpenTofu has compared your real infrastructure against your configuration and
08:43:10.708 STDOUT [bar] tofu: found no differences, so no changes are needed.
08:43:10.708 STDOUT [foo] tofu: No changes. Your infrastructure matches the configuration.
08:43:10.708 STDOUT [foo] tofu: OpenTofu has compared your real infrastructure against your configuration and
08:43:10.708 STDOUT [foo] tofu: found no differences, so no changes are needed.
08:43:10.716 STDOUT [foo] tofu:
08:43:10.716 STDOUT [foo] tofu: Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
08:43:10.716 STDOUT [foo] tofu:
08:43:10.720 STDOUT [bar] tofu:
08:43:10.720 STDOUT [bar] tofu: Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 0 changed, 0 destroyed.
08:43:10.720 STDOUT [bar] tofu:

This is where that additional verbosity in Terragrunt logging is really handy. You can see that Terragrunt concurrently ran apply -auto-approve in both the foo and bar units. The extra logging for Terragrunt also included information on the names of the units that were processed, and disambiguated the output from each unit.

Similar to the tofu CLI, there is a prompt to confirm that you are sure you want to run the command in each unit when performing a command that’s potentially destructive. You can skip this prompt by using the --non-interactive flag, just as you would with -auto-approve in OpenTofu.

terragrunt run-all --non-interactive apply

Use Terragrunt to manage your DAG

In the context of Terragrunt, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) is a data structure that represents the relationship between units in your stack, as determined by their dependencies.

Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense right now. The important thing to know is that Terragrunt uses the DAG to determine the order in which it performs runs across your stack. Once you see how Terragrunt uses the DAG to determine the order in which to run commands across your stack, you’ll understand why this is important.

For example, let’s say that the content of the bar unit depended on the content of the foo unit. You can express this dependency first by adding an output block to the shared module:
shared/output.tf
```
output "content" {
  value = local_file.file.content
}
```
Then, you can update the bar unit to depend on the foo unit by using the dependencies block in the terragrunt.hcl file:
bar/terragrunt.hcl
```
terraform {
 source = "../shared"
}

dependency "foo" {
 config_path = "../foo"
}

inputs = {
 content = "Foo content: ${dependency.foo.outputs.content}"
}
```
Being good citizens of the IaC world, we should run a plan before an apply to see what changes Terragrunt will make to our infrastructure (note that you will get an error here. This is expected, and we’ll fix it in the next step):
Terminal window
```
$ terragrunt run-all plan
08:57:09.271 INFO   The stack at . will be processed in the following order for command plan:
Group 1
- Module ./foo

Group 2
- Module ./bar

...

08:57:09.936 ERROR  [bar] Module ./bar has finished with an error
08:57:09.936 ERROR  error occurred:

* ./foo/terragrunt.hcl is a dependency of ./bar/terragrunt.hcl but detected no outputs. Either the target module has not been applied yet, or the module has no outputs.

  If this dependency is accessed before the outputs are ready (which can happen during the planning phase of an unapplied stack), consider using mock_outputs:

  dependency "foo" {
      config_path = "../foo"

      mock_outputs = {
          foo_output = "mock-foo-output"
      }
  }

  For more info, see:
  https://terragrunt.gruntwork.io/docs/features/stacks/#unapplied-dependency-and-mock-outputs

  If you do not require outputs from your dependency, consider using the dependencies block instead:
  https://terragrunt.gruntwork.io/docs/reference/config-blocks-and-attributes/#dependencies
```
Oh no! We got an error. This happens because the way in which dependencies are resolved by default in Terragrunt is to run terragrunt output within the dependency for use in the dependent unit. In this case, the foo unit has not been applied yet, so there are no outputs to fetch.

You should notice, however, that Terragrunt has already figured out the order in which to run the plan command across the units in your stack. This is what we mean when we say that Terragrunt uses a DAG to determine the order of runs in your stack. Terragrunt analyzes the dependencies in your stack, and determines an order for runs so that outputs are ready to be used as inputs in dependent units.

If you decided to run terragrunt run-all apply instead, you would instead see Terragrunt complete the apply in the foo unit first, and then complete the apply in the bar unit, as it’s aware that the bar unit might need some outputs from the foo unit.

Use mocks to handle unavailable outputs

In this scenario, most Terragrunt users leverage mock_outputs to handle unavailable outputs (see limitations on accessing exposed config). Given that it’s expected that the foo unit won’t be able to provide outputs until it’s applied, you can use the mock_outputs block to provide a placeholder value for the content output during the plan phase.

terraform {
  source = "../shared"
}

dependency "foo" {
  config_path = "../foo"
  mock_outputs = {
    content = "Mocked content from foo"
  }
}

inputs = {
  content = "Foo content: ${dependency.foo.outputs.content}"
}

Re-running the plan command should now complete successfully:

$ terragrunt run-all plan
09:29:03.461 INFO   The stack at . will be processed in the following order for command plan:
Group 1
- Module ./foo

Group 2
- Module ./bar

...

09:29:03.644 WARN   [bar] Config ./foo/terragrunt.hcl is a dependency of ./bar/terragrunt.hcl that has no outputs, but mock outputs provided and returning those in dependency output.

...

09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:   + resource "local_file" "file" {
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content              = "Foo content: Mocked content from foo"
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_base64sha256 = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_base64sha512 = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_md5          = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_sha1         = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_sha256       = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_sha512       = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + directory_permission = "0777"
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + file_permission      = "0777"
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + filename             = "./hi.txt"
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + id                   = (known after apply)
09:29:03.898 STDOUT [bar] tofu:     }

If you’re concerned about the mock_outputs attribute resulting in invalid configurations, note that during an apply, the outputs of foo will be known, and Terragrunt won’t use mock_outputs to resolve the outputs of foo.

$ terragrunt run-all --non-interactive apply

...

09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:   + resource "local_file" "file" {
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content              = "Foo content: Hello from foo, Terragrunt!"
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_base64sha256 = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_base64sha512 = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_md5          = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_sha1         = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_sha256       = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + content_sha512       = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + directory_permission = "0777"
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + file_permission      = "0777"
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + filename             = "./hi.txt"
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:       + id                   = (known after apply)
09:31:21.587 STDOUT [bar] tofu:     }

...

You can also be explicit about the fact that you only want to use mock_outputs during the plan phase by specifying that in your dependency configuration:

terraform {
  source = "../shared"
}

dependency "foo" {
  config_path = "../foo"
  mock_outputs = {
    content = "Mocked content from foo"
  }

  mock_outputs_allowed_terraform_commands = ["plan"]
}

inputs = {
  content = "Foo content: ${dependency.foo.outputs.content}"
}

Something a little subtle just happened there. Note that the inputs attribute is dynamic. This addresses some of the limitations mentioned earlier about using terraform.tfvars files to manage inputs for units. Given that the bar unit is dependent on output values from the foo unit, you wouldn’t be able to use a terraform.tfvars file to populate this variable without some additional tooling to populate it dynamically.

Terragrunt was spawned organically out of supporting Gruntwork customers using Terraform at scale, and features in the product are designed to address common problems like these that arise when managing OpenTofu/Terraform projects at scale in production.

Continue learning and exploring

Hopefully, following this simple tutorial has given you confidence in integrating Terragrunt into your existing OpenTofu/Terraform projects. Starting small, and gradually introducing more complex Terragrunt features is a great way to learn how Terragrunt can help you manage your infrastructure more effectively.

The next step of the Getting Started guide is to follow the Overview guide. This guide will introduce you to more advanced Terragrunt features, and show you how to use Terragrunt to manage your infrastructure across multiple environments in a real-world AWS account.

If you’re ready to get your hands dirty with more advanced Terragrunt features yourself, you can skip ahead to the Features section of the documentation.

If you ever need help with a particular problem, take a look at the resources available to you in the Support section. You are especially encouraged to join the Terragrunt Discord server, and become part of the Terragrunt community.

Quick Start

Install Terragrunt

Add terragrunt.hcl to your project

Tutorial

Add `terragrunt.hcl` to your project