Configuration Syntax

Other pages in this section have described various configuration constructs that can appear in the OpenTofu language. This page describes the lower-level syntax of the language in more detail, revealing the building blocks that those constructs are built from.

This page describes the native syntax of the OpenTofu language, which is a rich language designed to be relatively easy for humans to read and write. The constructs in the OpenTofu language can also be expressed in JSON syntax, which is harder for humans to read and edit but easier to generate and parse programmatically.

This low-level syntax of the OpenTofu language is defined in terms of a syntax called HCL, which is also used by configuration languages in other applications, and in particular other HashiCorp products. It is not necessary to know all of the details of HCL syntax in order to use OpenTofu, and so this page summarizes the most important details. If you are interested, you can find a full definition of HCL syntax in the HCL native syntax specification (opens in a new tab).

Arguments and Blocks

The OpenTofu language syntax is built around two key syntax constructs: arguments and blocks.

Arguments

An argument assigns a value to a particular name:

image_id = "abc123"

The identifier before the equals sign is the argument name, and the expression after the equals sign is the argument's value.

The context where the argument appears determines what value types are valid (for example, each resource type has a schema that defines the types of its arguments), but many arguments accept arbitrary expressions, which allow the value to either be specified literally or generated from other values programmatically.

:::note OpenTofu's configuration language is based on a more general language called HCL, and HCL's documentation usually uses the word "attribute" instead of "argument." These words are similar enough to be interchangeable in this context, and experienced OpenTofu users might use either term in casual conversation. But because OpenTofu also interacts with several other things called "attributes" (in particular, OpenTofu resources have attributes like id that can be referenced from expressions but can't be assigned values in configuration), we've chosen to use "argument" in the OpenTofu documentation when referring to this syntax construct. :::

Blocks

A block is a container for other content:

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami = "abc123"
 
  network_interface {
    # ...
  }
}

A block has a type (resource in this example). Each block type defines how many labels must follow the type keyword. The resource block type expects two labels, which are aws_instance and example in the example above. A particular block type may have any number of required labels, or it may require none as with the nested network_interface block type.

After the block type keyword and any labels, the block body is delimited by the { and } characters. Within the block body, further arguments and blocks may be nested, creating a hierarchy of blocks and their associated arguments.

The OpenTofu language uses a limited number of top-level block types, which are blocks that can appear outside of any other block in a configuration file. Most of OpenTofu's features (including resources, input variables, output values, data sources, etc.) are implemented as top-level blocks.

Identifiers

Argument names, block type names, and the names of most OpenTofu-specific constructs like resources, input variables, etc. are all identifiers.

Identifiers can contain letters, digits, underscores (_), and hyphens (-). The first character of an identifier must not be a digit, to avoid ambiguity with literal numbers.

For complete identifier rules, OpenTofu implements the Unicode identifier syntax (opens in a new tab), extended to include the ASCII hyphen character -.

Comments

The OpenTofu language supports three different syntaxes for comments:

# begins a single-line comment, ending at the end of the line.
// also begins a single-line comment, as an alternative to #.
/* and */ are start and end delimiters for a comment that might span over multiple lines.

The # single-line comment style is the default comment style and should be used in most cases. Automatic configuration formatting tools may automatically transform // comments into # comments, since the double-slash style is not idiomatic.

Character Encoding and Line Endings

OpenTofu configuration files must always be UTF-8 encoded. While the delimiters of the language are all ASCII characters, OpenTofu accepts non-ASCII characters in identifiers, comments, and string values.

OpenTofu accepts configuration files with either Unix-style line endings (LF only) or Windows-style line endings (CR then LF), but the idiomatic style is to use the Unix convention, and so automatic configuration formatting tools may automatically transform CRLF endings to LF.

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