Enabling fast, safe migration to HCP Terraform with Terraform migrate (tf-migrate)

Have you ever found yourself stuck managing Terraform Community Edition (CE) at scale? Maybe state files became a headache, or collaboration across teams felt impossible without centralized controls. You’re not alone.

Many teams love the flexibility of CE but hit roadblocks as they grow — whether it’s error-prone state management, time-consuming manual fixes, or struggling to enforce governance. This is when the core value proposition of HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise starts to make a lot of sense.

Decathlon’s journey from Terraform CE to Enterprise highlights the transformative benefits of migrating to a commercial solution. By moving to HCP Terraform, Decathlon achieved centralized state management, improved governance, and seamless collaboration across global teams, enabling their transition from on-premises infrastructure to 100% cloud.

One of the hardest things to do at scale with Terraform CE is manage state files safely. When teams and organizations decide to migrate from Terraform CE to HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise, state file management during that migration is the biggest challenge we see. This led to our engineers building Terraform migrate (tf-migrate), a utility for automating state migrations to HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise. In addition to state migration, it also simplifies workspace setup and supports modular refactoring.

This post will look at the use cases and current capabilities of Terraform migrate and show you how to get started with it.

»State file migration can be risky

State files are essential for mapping Terraform’s provisioned resources back to configuration files and are often the backbone of infrastructure operations. As infrastructure estates grow and more teams need to provision, the DIY state management required for Terraform CE becomes more risky and costly.

HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise version and encrypt the storage for state files while also adding a role-based access control system around them. This makes it safer and easier to share states across a team or an entire organization.

Unfortunately, to get their Terraform states into a safer system, a migration process is required that can also be risky and challenging. These risks include human error and misconfigurations, which could result in downtime and infrastructure drift.

Terraform migrate (tf-migrate) was designed to automate and secure this gap in state file safety. tf-migrate mitigates the risks of human error and misconfigurations by providing a reliable and efficient framework for managing complex infrastructure changes. It can also save weeks' worth of planning and operational effort.

»tf-migrate: Use cases and current capabilities

Currently, Terraform migrate is a command-line tool that leverages both the tfe provider and tfmigrate provider. It supports two use cases:

1. Migration: Encompassing workspace setup, state migration, and backend changes
2. State refactoring: Helps take existing workspaces and assists with rearchitecting the collections of provisioned resources, allowing teams to consolidate or split Terraform state files, which is particularly useful for large-scale environments with complex interdependencies.

»How to run a migration with tf-migrate

To start using tf-migrate, you will give it a Terraform configuration for your existing infrastructure. tf-migrate will read the configuration and generate a plan outlining the steps to migrate your infrastructure to the HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise.

Here is the basic setup and workflow to perform a migration with tf-migrate using the CLI:

1. Download and install tf-migrate: You can manually download and install tf-migrate or use Homebrew if you are on macOS.
2. tf-migrate prepare: This step scans the current working directory and generates Terraform configuration to migrate your state. The generated migration plan depends on the structure of your configuration. For more information, refer to tf-migrate prepare.
3. tf-migrate execute: This step directs Terraform to run the init, plan, and apply commands to migrate to HCP Terraform. At the end of the migration, tf-migrate displays a summary of what it migrated, links to the workspaces it created, and, if configured, a link to the pull request it created. For more information, refer to tf-migrate execute.

»The future of Terraform migrate

The potential future features of tf-migrate are extensive and can significantly expand its capabilities, including:

• Integrating popular version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket could enhance migration workflows by embedding migration configurations directly into repositories, allowing for seamless collaboration and versioning of migration tasks.
• Enhancing and extending the migration capabilities to support variables, modules, and private registries between multiple Terraform deployment options.
• Improved handling of sensitive data during migrations, such as secrets or access tokens, would strengthen security and compliance.
• Further integration with Terraform Enterprise and Terraform Cloud could enhance governance by offering centralized control over migration tasks, audit trails, and policy enforcement.

»Terraform migrate and your ILM strategy

Terraform migrate makes migrating Community Edition workloads to HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise simple and straightforward, accelerating time-to-value for teams that want to adopt a commercial edition of Terraform. What this means is that for platform teams and operators, Terraform migrate eliminates the heavy lifting and mitigates risks associated with migrating from Terraform CE to HCP Terraform or Enterprise at scale.

HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise provide centralized control, enhanced security, and smoother collaboration across large organizations, allowing teams to focus on delivering scalable and efficient infrastructure. Terraform migrate bridges the gap for organizations seeking to scale their infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) strategy while minimizing risks associated with state file migrations.

Terraform migrate is currently in its public beta stage. If you have questions or feedback, join us on our Discuss forum. To get a full deep-dive on Terraform migrate, visit our tf-migrate documentation.