If you'd like to build OpenTofu from source, you can do so using the Go build toolchain and the options specified in this document.
- Ensure you've installed the Go language version specified in
.go-version. - Clone this repository to a location of your choice.
OpenTofu accepts certain options passed using ldflags at build time which control the behavior of the resulting binary.
OpenTofu will include a -dev flag when reporting its own version (ex: 1.5.0-dev) unless version.dev is set to no:
go build -ldflags "-w -s -X 'github.com/opentofu/opentofu/version.dev=no'" -o bin/ ./cmd/tofu
Experimental features of OpenTofu will be disabled unless main.experimentsAllowed is set to yes:
go build -ldflags "-w -s -X 'main.experimentsAllowed=yes'" -o bin/ ./cmd/tofu
For the most part, the OpenTofu release process relies on the Go toolchain defaults for the target operating system and processor architecture.
One exception is the CGO_ENABLED option, which is set explicitly when building OpenTofu binaries. For most platforms, we build with CGO_ENABLED=0 in order to produce a statically linked binary. For MacOS/Darwin operating systems, we build with CGO_ENABLED=1 to avoid a platform-specific issue with DNS resolution.