Files
opentf/website/docs/cli/commands/show.mdx
Martin Atkins f42dfbc497 tofu show: new explicit/extensible usage style
The "tofu show" command has historically been difficult to extend to meet
new use-cases, such as showing the current configuration without creating
a plan, because it was designed to take zero or one arguments and then try
to guess what the one specified argument was intended to mean.

This commit introduces a new style where the type of object to inspect is
specified using command line option syntax, using one of two
mutually-exclusive options:

    -state      Show the latest state snapshot.
    -plan=FILE  Show the plan from the given saved plan file.

We expect that a future commit will extend this with a new "-config" option
to inspect the configuration rooted in the current working directory, and
possibly with "-module=DIR" to shallowly inspect a single module without
necessarily having to fully initialize it with all of its dependencies
first. However, both of those use-cases (and any others) are not in scope
for this commit, which is focused only on refactoring to make those future
use-cases possible.

The old mode of specifying neither option and providing zero or one
positional arguments is still supported for backward compatibility.
Notably, the legacy style is the only way to access the legacy behavior of
inspecting a specific state snapshot file from the local filesystem, which
has not often been used since Terraform v0.9 as we've moved away
from manual management of state files to the structure of state backends.
Those who _do_ still need that old behavior can still access it in the
old way, but there will be no new-style equivalent of it unless we learn
of a compelling use case for it.

Signed-off-by: Martin Atkins <mart@degeneration.co.uk>
2025-04-24 15:04:11 -07:00

89 lines
3.5 KiB
Plaintext

---
description: >-
The tofu show command can inspect various OpenTofu artifacts and produce
either human-readable or machine-readable descriptions.
---
# Command: show
The `tofu show` command can inspect various OpenTofu artifacts and produce
either human-readable or machine-readable descriptions.
For example, you can use `tofu show` to inspect a saved plan file to check
that the planned operations are acceptable, or to inspect the latest state
snapshot.
:::note
When using the `-json` command-line flag, any sensitive values in
OpenTofu state will be returned in plain text. For more information, see
[Sensitive Data in State](../../language/state/sensitive-data.mdx).
:::
## Usage
Usage: `tofu show [target-selection-option] [other-options]`
Use one of the following target selection options to specify the artifact
to inspect:
- `-state`: Inspect the latest state snapshot, if any.
- `-plan=FILENAME`: Inspect the plan stored in the given saved plan file.
The `-state` option is the default if none of these options are used. The
target-selection options are mutually-exclusive.
This command also accepts the following additional options:
- `-no-color`: Disables the use of terminal escape sequences in
human-oriented output.
- `-json`: Selects the machine-readable JSON output format, instead
of the default human-oriented output.
- `-var` and `-var-file`: Specifies values for any input variables
used in module source addresses or backend settings in the
current configuration.
This command relies on schema information from provider plugins to fully
understand the provider-specific data structures in state, plan, and
configuration artifacts. If you are currently using different provider
versions than were used when creating the selected artifact then
you may need to use `tofu apply` (or similar) to allow OpenTofu to
upgrade the stored data to match the latest provider schemas.
## JSON Output
When using the `-json` option, the structure of the machine-readable output
depends on the selected artifact type:
- `-state` returns [the JSON state representation](../../internals/json-format.mdx#state-representation).
- `-plan=FILENAME` returns the [the JSON plan representation](../../internals/json-format.mdx#plan-representation),
which also includes information about the configuration and
prior state that the plan was based on.
## Legacy Usage
For backward compatibility with older versions of OpenTofu, this
command also supports a different usage pattern:
`tofu show [other-options] <filename>`
In this style, none of the explicit target selection options can be used
and instead OpenTofu inspects the given file and reacts in the following
ways:
- If the file can be loaded as a saved plan file, behaves like `-plan=FILENAME`
with the same file.
- If the file can be parsed as a local state snapshot file such as those
created by `tofu state pull`, inspects the content of that state file
using the same output format as would normally be used to inspect the
latest state snapshot.
The selected state snapshot file must be one associated with the
configuration in the current working directory, or else the results
are unspecified because the available providers might not match
those that were used to create the data in the state snapshot.
Unless you need the legacy behavior of inspecting an arbitrary state
snapshot file, we recommend using the new explicit target selection
options to make it clearer to OpenTofu what artifact type you wish to
inspect.