formae discovers the infrastructure running in your cloud accounts and clusters, keeps a versioned record of every resource and every change to it, whoever made the change, and applies changes at any granularity, from a single property to a whole environment. There is no state file to manage. You work with it through code, the CLI or an AI agent.

It can be used as an alternative to Terraform, OpenTofu or Pulumi, or alongside them, Helm and manual changes, on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes and other platforms.

This repository is formae IaC, the open source edition you run yourself. formae Cloud is the same formae with the agent run and managed for you.

Documentation · Quick start · Plugins · Release notes · Website · Discord

Install

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://hub.platform.engineering/get/formae.sh)"
export PATH=/opt/pel/bin:$PATH
formae --version

Linux and macOS. A container image and a Helm chart are available for running the agent on a server or in Kubernetes.

Example

Start the agent, then see what already exists and get code for it:

formae agent start                                            # in its own terminal
formae inventory resources --query="managed:false"            # resources formae found but does not manage
formae extract --query 'type:AWS::S3::Bucket' ./buckets.pkl   # code for them, generated from what is running

Or declare resources yourself. A forma in Pkl, main.pkl:

amends "@formae/forma.pkl"
import "@formae/formae.pkl"
import "@aws/aws.pkl"
import "@aws/s3/bucket.pkl"

forma {
  new formae.Stack {
    label = "my-app"
  }

  new formae.Target {
    label = "my-aws-target"
    config = new aws.Config {
      region = "us-east-1"
    }
  }

  new bucket.Bucket {
    label = "app-bucket"
    bucketName = "my-unique-bucket-name"
  }
}

formae apply --mode reconcile main.pkl   # shows the plan, asks before changing anything

The quick start deploys a full example to AWS, Azure or GCP in about ten minutes.

How it works

• Discovery. The agent scans each target (a cloud account, region or cluster) every 10 minutes by default and records resources it does not manage as unmanaged. Unmanaged resources are read-only to formae until you bring them under management.
• Synchronization. Every 5 minutes by default, the agent reads the resources it knows about and records any change made outside formae, which other tools usually call drift. It does not edit your code repository or change cloud resources on its own.
• Extract. formae extract writes Pkl for any set of resources, managed or not, so code can be generated from the running infrastructure instead of written by hand.
• Code. Infrastructure As Code (IaC): desired state is declared in a forma, a file written in Pkl, a configuration language with types and constraints. Resource types are Pkl schemas provided by the plugins, so a forma is type-checked before anything is applied.
• Reconcile. formae apply --mode reconcile makes a stack match the forma in your code, on disk or in your repository, including deletions. If out-of-band changes (drift) were recorded, it stops and asks you to absorb each one into the desired state or revert it. Works with GitOps: keep the Pkl in Git and run reconcile from CI.
• Patch. formae apply --mode patch only creates or updates the resources named in the forma you apply and never deletes anything; collections such as tags are only added to. It is meant for targeted and emergency changes.
• Agent. The CLI talks to an agent that executes operations and stores state in its own database (SQLite, PostgreSQL, Aurora Data API or SQL Server). Run it yourself locally, on a server or in Kubernetes, or use formae Cloud, where it is run for you.
• Plugins. Comparable to Terraform providers: each plugin is a separate, independently versioned process that adds the resource types of one platform.

Concepts in detail: forma, stack, target, apply modes, discovery, synchronization, architecture.

Compared with Terraform and Pulumi

Longer write-ups: formae vs. Terraform, formae vs. Pulumi.

Plugins

Official plugins, published on the formae hub:

• Cloud: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud (OCI), OVHcloud, Fly.io, Vercel
• Containers: Kubernetes, Docker Compose
• Data: Databricks, Supabase
• Observability: Datadog, Grafana, PagerDuty
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD
• AI: vLLM
• Other: SFTP

To write a plugin for anything with an API, start from the plugin template and the plugin SDK guide.

AI agents

formae has an MCP server, so AI coding assistants can query and change infrastructure through the same agent and schemas as the CLI.

Claude Code only, run inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add platform-engineering-labs/formae-marketplace
/plugin install formae@formae-marketplace

Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and other MCP clients: see AI assistants for each client's setup.

Source: formae-mcp. The documentation is also available as llms.txt.

Editions

• formae IaC (this repository): open source and self-hosted. You run the agent.
• formae Cloud: formae with the agent run and managed for you. You work with it through your AI coding assistant; there is no agent to operate. Quick start with formae Cloud.

See pricing.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md. Questions and discussion: Discord.

Security

Report vulnerabilities to [email protected].

License

formae is open source under FSL-1.1-ALv2: free to use, modify and self-host, and every release converts to Apache-2.0 after two years.

Built by Platform Engineering Labs.