For years, automating HCP Terraform platform operations meant building and maintaining custom tooling on top of the API. Today, we're changing that with tfctl, the first dedicated CLI for HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise, now available on GitHub.
»The missing interface
HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise had no official first-party CLI for platform operations. The Terraform CLI handles infrastructure workflows like plan and apply, but it doesn’t cover platform operations like canceling runs, creating workspaces, managing variables, or administering organizations. As infrastructure automation becomes more sophisticated, a reliable, first-class interface to the platform isn't a nice-to-have. It's a prerequisite.
»Introducing tfctl
tfctl gives platform engineers and AI agents a single, discoverable interface to the HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise platform API. tfctl handles the platform operations that sit outside of your Terraform code but are central to how your team works day to day.
Today's release includes:
Built-in safety guardrails. All commands support
--dry-runto preview changes before they take effect. Delete commands require interactive confirmation, making them effectively inoperable by autonomous agents, by design.Schema discovery. Use
tfctl apischema search to find any API operation by keyword and retrieve the precise schema needed to form a request, useful for both humans navigating the API and agents operating autonomously.Flexible output modes. Every command supports JSON, markdown, and human-readable table output, so whether you're piping into jq, dropping output into a GitHub PR, or reading it at the terminal, tfctl works the way you do.
Full API coverage via OpenAPI foundation. tfctl is built on top of the HCP Terraform OpenAPI spec, giving it access to 100% of the documented API today. As the platform evolves, older versions of tfctl can still access new endpoints without requiring a new release.
»Getting started
Whether you're automating platform operations from the terminal or pairing tfctl with a coding agent, here's what teams are using it for:
Troubleshooting and incident response: Diagnose a failed run, identify whether the issue is in your code or the platform, and get a proposed fix to review.
Change impact analysis: Before merging, identify likely affected workspaces, read their latest plans, and summarize destroys, replacements, and policy failures.
Lifecycle management: Audit workspaces at scale, rotate variables across environments, upgrade Terraform versions, or scaffold new workspaces. Destructive changes always require human approval.
tfctl is available now on GitHub, and we’d love to hear what you think. To get started, visit the repository and try it with your HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise environment.
If you are new to HCP Terraform, you can get started for free and begin managing your infrastructure in any environment.
This is the foundation for more to come as we continue investing in how platform engineers and AI agents work with HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise.
