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Overview

The Terragrunt CLI is designed to make it as easy as possible to manage infrastructure at any scale.

To support that design, there are certain patterns that are used throughout the CLI. This document will help you understand those patterns so you can use the CLI more effectively.

Usage

Section titled “Usage”

Most of the time, if you are trying to use Terragrunt to run a command that you would normally run with OpenTofu/Terraform, you can just replace tofu/ terraform with terragrunt.

Terragrunt will pass the command to tofu/ terraform with the same arguments.

Terminal window
terragrunt plan

Terragrunt doesn’t always just pass the command. It frequently does some additional processing to make it easier to manage infrastructure at scale.

For example, in the previous plan command, you wouldn’t have to explicitly run init like you would with tofu/ terraform. Terragrunt takes advantage of a feature called Auto-init to automatically run init when necessary.

Using Terragrunt in this way is taking advantage of the OpenTofu Shortcuts that Terragrunt provides.

OpenTofu Shortcuts Use Terragrunt as a drop-in replacement for OpenTofu/Terraform commands.

Terragrunt also has some other commands that are unique to Terragrunt.

Main Commands

Section titled “Main Commands”

These are the main commands you will use with Terragrunt:

exec Execute an arbitrary command, wrapped by Terragrunt.
run Run OpenTofu/Terraform commands.

Backend Commands

Section titled “Backend Commands”

These are the commands that are used when working with OpenTofu/Terraform state backends:

backend bootstrap Bootstrap OpenTofu/Terraform backend infrastructure.
backend delete Delete backend state used by a unit.
backend migrate Migrate OpenTofu/Terraform state from one unit to another.

Stack Commands

Section titled “Stack Commands”

These are the commands that are used when working with a terragrunt.stack.hcl file:

stack clean Remove `.terragrunt-stack` directories created by `stack` commands.
stack generate Generate a stack of units based on configurations in a terragrunt.stack.hcl file.
stack output Get outputs from a stack of units.
stack run Run a command against a stack of units defined in a terragrunt.stack.hcl file.

Catalog Commands

Section titled “Catalog Commands”

These are the commands that are used when working with a Terragrunt catalog:

catalog Launch a Terminal User Interface (TUI) to browse and use OpenTofu/Terraform modules.
scaffold Generate Terragrunt configuration files from a catalog.

Discovery Commands

Section titled “Discovery Commands”

These are the commands that are used to discover units in your Terragrunt project:

find Find relevant Terragrunt configurations.
list List Terragrunt configurations in your codebase.

Configuration Commands

Section titled “Configuration Commands”

These are the commands that are used to interact directly with Terragrunt configuration:

render Render the Terragrunt configuration in the current working directory, with as much work done as possible beforehand (that is, with all includes merged, dependencies resolved/interpolated, function calls executed, etc).
dag graph Graph the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) in DOT language.
hcl fmt Recursively find HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) files and rewrite them into a canonical format.
hcl validate Recursively find HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) files and validate them.
info print Print out a short description of Terragrunt context.

Global Flags

Section titled “Global Flags”

There are some flags that are available to all Terragrunt commands:

Global Flags Global flags for the Terragrunt CLI.