Terrafactor

Terraform provider generation engine — builds fully functional Terraform providers from OpenAPI specs and the official terraform-provider-scaffold template.

Overview

Terrafactor reads an OpenAPI 3.0 spec and a provider.hcl manifest, then scaffolds a complete, compilable Terraform provider written in Go. The generated provider includes real HTTP CRUD operations, an APIClient wired to the configured endpoint, typed resource models, and proper Terraform state management — not stubs.

Provider generation is the core of terrafactor. A secondary feature (terrafactor print) provides Terraform-style colored output formatting that can also be embedded directly into Go applications.

---

Provider Generation Engine

How it works

1. Parse provider.hcl — declares provider name, org, registry, OpenAPI spec path, and release metadata
2. Parse the OpenAPI spec — extracts collection paths, detail paths, path parameters, and CRUD operations (POST/GET/PUT/PATCH/DELETE)
3. Scaffold or update a full Terraform provider in engine/store/<name>/

Each resource in the spec becomes:

• A resource.go with APIModel, toAPIModel()/fromAPIModel() conversions, and real Create/Read/Update/Delete HTTP methods
• A data_source.go with a real GET
• An ephemeral_resource.go with a real GET open
• Schema, examples, and test stubs

The generated provider.go defines an APIClient struct that carries the HTTP client and configured endpoint, wired through provider Configure() to all resources.

provider.hcl

provider {
  name             = "myprovider"
  org              = "myorg"
  registry         = "registry.terraform.io"
  go_module_prefix = "github.com/myorg"

  schema {
    spec = "path/to/openapi.yaml"
  }

  release {
    version = "0.1.0"
    license = "MPL-2.0"
  }

  author {
    name   = "My Name"
    email  = "me@example.com"
    github = "myorg"
  }
}

CLI commands

# Scaffold a new provider for the first time
terrafactor provider build provider.hcl

# Preview changes without writing files
terrafactor provider plan provider.hcl

# Re-render after OpenAPI spec changes
terrafactor provider apply provider.hcl

# Remove generated provider (can be rebuilt)
terrafactor provider destroy provider.hcl

# Build binary and wire dev_overrides in ~/.terraformrc
terrafactor provider install provider.hcl

# Remove binary and dev_overrides entry
terrafactor provider uninstall provider.hcl

All commands show a Terraform-style diff before making changes and require yes confirmation.

Generated provider structure

engine/store/<name>/
├── internal/provider/
│   ├── provider.go               # APIClient, Configure, resource/datasource registration
│   ├── <resource>_resource.go    # APIModel, CRUD HTTP calls, state management
│   ├── <resource>_data_source.go
│   └── <resource>_ephemeral_resource.go
├── examples/
└── ...

---

Terraform-Style Output (embeddable)

A secondary utility for printing JSON data in Terraform-style colored output. Useful for CLIs or tools that want to show resource changes in a familiar format.

Installation

go get github.com/cloudputation/terrafactor

Import

import terrafactor "github.com/cloudputation/terrafactor/packages/terrafactor"

Usage

err := terrafactor.Print(data, "create", "    ", os.Stdout)
// operationTag: "create" (green +) or "destroy" (red -)

Print accepts any interface{} (typically an unmarshaled JSON object), an operation tag, an indent string, and an io.Writer.

Error handling

Passing an unsupported operationTag returns:

invalid operation: <operation>. Supported operations are 'create' or 'destroy'

CLI

terrafactor print <json_file> <create|destroy>