HCP Terraform API documentation

HCP Terraform provides an API for a subset of its features. If you have any questions or want to request new API features, please email support@hashicorp.com.

Note: Before planning an API integration, consider whether the tfe Terraform provider meets your needs. It can't create or approve runs in response to arbitrary events, but it's a useful tool for managing your organizations, teams, and workspaces as code.

HashiCorp provides a stability policy for the HCP Terraform API, ensuring backwards compatibility for stable endpoints. The changelog tracks changes to the API for HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise.

Authentication

All requests must be authenticated with a bearer token. Use the HTTP header Authorization with the value Bearer <token>. If the token is absent or invalid, HCP Terraform responds with HTTP status 401 and a JSON API error object. The 401 status code is reserved for problems with the authentication token; forbidden requests with a valid token result in a 404.

You can use the following types of tokens to authenticate:

User tokens — each HCP Terraform user can have any number of API tokens, which can make requests on their behalf.
Team tokens — each team can have one API token at a time. This is intended for performing plans and applies via a CI/CD pipeline.
Organization tokens — each organization can have one API token at a time. This is intended for automating the management of teams, team membership, and workspaces. The organization token cannot perform plans and applies.
Audit trails token - each organization can have a single token that can read that organization's audit trails. Use this token type to authenticate integrations pulling audit trail data, for example, using the HCP Terraform for Splunk app.

Blob Storage Authentication

HCP Terraform relies on a HashiCorp-developed blob storage service for storing statefiles and multiple other pieces of customer data, all of which are documented on our data security page.

Unlike the HCP Terraform API, this service does not require that a bearer token be submitted with each request. Instead, each URL includes a securely generated secret and is only valid for 25 hours.

For example, the state versions api returns a field named hosted-state-download, which is a URL of this form: https://archivist.terraform.io/v1/object/<secret value>

This is a broadly accepted pattern for secure access. It is important to treat these URLs themselves as secrets. They should not be logged, nor shared with untrusted parties.

Feature Entitlements

HCP Terraform is available at multiple pricing tiers (including free), which offer different feature sets.

Each organization has a set of entitlements that corresponds to its pricing tier. These entitlements determine which HCP Terraform features the organization can use.

If an organization doesn't have the necessary entitlement to use a given feature, HCP Terraform returns a 404 error for API requests to any endpoints devoted to that feature.

The show entitlement set endpoint can return information about an organization's current entitlements, which is useful if your client needs to change its interface when a given feature isn't available.

The following entitlements are available:

agents — Allows isolated, private or on-premises infrastructure to communicate with an organization in HCP Terraform. Affects the agent pools, agents, and agent tokens endpoints.
audit-logging — Allows an organization to access audit trails.
configuration-designer — Allows an organization to use the Configuration Designer.
cost-estimation — Allows an organization to access cost estimation.
global-run-tasks — Allows an organization to apply run tasks to every workspace. Affects the run tasks endpoints. This feature is currently in beta.
module-tests-generation - Allows an organization to generate tests for private registry modules. This feature is currently in beta.
operations — Allows an organization to perform runs within HCP Terraform. Affects the runs, plans, and applies endpoints.
policy-enforcement — Allows an organization to use Sentinel. Affects the policies, policy sets, and policy checks endpoints.
private-module-registry — Allows an organization to publish and use modules with the private module registry. Affects the registry modules endpoints.
private-policy-agents - Allows an organization to ensure that HTTP enabled Sentinel and OPA policies can communicate with isolated, private, or on-premises infrastructure.
run-tasks — Allows an organization to use run tasks. Affects the run tasks endpoints.
self-serve-billing — Allows an organization to pay via credit card using the in-app billing UI.
sentinel - DEPRECATED Use policy-enforcement instead.
state-storage — Allows an organization to store state versions in its workspaces, which enables local Terraform runs with HCP Terraform. Affects the state versions endpoints.
sso — Allows an organization to manage and authenticate users with single sign on.
teams — Allows an organization to manage access to its workspaces with teams. Without this entitlement, an organization only has an owners team. Affects the teams, team members, team access, and team tokens endpoints.
user-limit — An integer value representing the maximum number of users allowed for the organization. If blank, there is no limit.
vcs-integrations — Allows an organization to connect with a VCS provider and link VCS repositories to workspaces. Affects the OAuth Clients, and OAuth Tokens endpoints, and determines whether the data.attributes.vcs-repo property can be set for workspaces.

Response Codes

This API returns standard HTTP response codes.

We return 404 Not Found codes for resources that a user doesn't have access to, as well as for resources that don't exist. This is to avoid telling a potential attacker that a given resource exists.

Versioning

The API documented in these pages is the second version of HCP Terraform's API, and resides under the /v2 prefix.

Future APIs will increment this version, leaving the /v1 API intact, though in the future we might deprecate certain features. In that case, we'll provide ample notice to migrate to the new API.

Paths

All V2 API endpoints use /api/v2 as a prefix unless otherwise specified.

For example, if the API endpoint documentation defines the path /runs then the full path is /api/v2/runs.

JSON API Formatting

The HCP Terraform endpoints use the JSON API specification, which specifies key aspects of the API. Most notably:

JSON API Documents

Since our API endpoints use the JSON API spec, most of them return JSON API documents.

Endpoints that use the POST method also require a JSON API document as the request payload. A request object usually looks something like this:

{
  "data": {
    "type":"vars",
    "attributes": {
      "key":"some_key",
      "value":"some_value",
      "category":"terraform",
      "hcl":false,
      "sensitive":false
    },
    "relationships": {
      "workspace": {
        "data": {
          "id":"ws-4j8p6jX1w33MiDC7",
          "type":"workspaces"
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

These objects always include a top-level data property, which:

Must have a type property to indicate what type of API object you're interacting with.
Often has an attributes property to specify attributes of the object you're creating or modifying.
Sometimes has a relationships property to specify other objects that are linked to what you're working with.

In the documentation for each API method, we use dot notation to explain the structure of nested objects in the request. For example, the properties of the request object above are listed as follows:

Key path	Type	Default	Description
`data.type`	string		Must be `"vars"`.
`data.attributes.key`	string		The name of the variable.
`data.attributes.value`	string		The value of the variable.
`data.attributes.category`	string		Whether this is a Terraform or environment variable. Valid values are `"terraform"` or `"env"`.
`data.attributes.hcl`	bool	`false`	Whether to evaluate the value of the variable as a string of HCL code. Has no effect for environment variables.
`data.attributes.sensitive`	bool	`false`	Whether the value is sensitive. If true then the variable is written once and not visible thereafter.
`data.relationships.workspace.data.type`	string		Must be `"workspaces"`.
`data.relationships.workspace.data.id`	string		The ID of the workspace that owns the variable.

We also always include a sample payload object, to show the document structure more visually.

Query Parameters

Although most of our API endpoints use the POST method and receive their parameters as a JSON object in the request payload, some of them use the GET method. These GET endpoints sometimes require URL query parameters, in the standard ...path?key1=value1&key2=value2 format.

Since these parameters were originally designed as part of a JSON object, they sometimes have characters that must be percent-encoded in a query parameter. For example, [ becomes %5B and ] becomes %5D.

For more about URI structure and query strings, see the specification (RFC 3986) or the Wikipedia page on URIs.

Pagination

Most of the endpoints that return lists of objects support pagination. A client may pass the following query parameters to control pagination on supported endpoints:

Parameter	Description
`page[number]`	Optional. If omitted, the endpoint will return the first page.
`page[size]`	Optional. If omitted, the endpoint will return 20 items per page. The maximum page size is 100.

Additional data is returned in the links and meta top level attributes of the response.

{
  "data": [...],
  "links": {
    "self": "https://app.terraform.io/api/v2/organizations/hashicorp/workspaces?page%5Bnumber%5D=1&page%5Bsize%5D=20",
    "first": "https://app.terraform.io/api/v2/organizations/hashicorp/workspaces?page%5Bnumber%5D=1&page%5Bsize%5D=20",
    "prev": null,
    "next": "https://app.terraform.io/api/v2/organizations/hashicorp/workspaces?page%5Bnumber%5D=2&page%5Bsize%5D=20",
    "last": "https://app.terraform.io/api/v2/organizations/hashicorp/workspaces?page%5Bnumber%5D=2&page%5Bsize%5D=20"
  },
  "meta": {
    "pagination": {
      "current-page": 1,
      "prev-page": null,
      "next-page": 2,
      "total-pages": 2,
      "total-count": 21
    }
  }
}

Some of the API's GET endpoints can return additional information about nested resources by adding an include query parameter, whose value is a comma-separated list of resource types.

The related resource options are listed in each endpoint's documentation where available.

The related resources will appear in an included section of the response.

Example:

$ curl \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \
  --header "Content-Type: application/vnd.api+json" \
  --request GET \
  https://app.terraform.io/api/v2/teams/team-n8UQ6wfhyym25sMe?include=users

{
  "data": {
    "id": "team-n8UQ6wfhyym25sMe",
    "type": "teams",
    "attributes": {
      "name": "owners",
      "users-count": 1
      ...
    },
    "relationships": {
      "users": {
        "data": [
          {
              "id": "user-62goNpx1ThQf689e",
              "type": "users"
          }
        ]
      } ...
    }
    ...
  },
  "included": [
    {
      "id": "user-62goNpx1ThQf689e",
      "type": "users",
      "attributes": {
        "username": "hashibot"
        ...
      } ...
    }
  ]
}

Rate Limiting

You can make up to 30 requests per second to the API as an authenticated or unauthenticated request. If you reach the rate limit then your access will be throttled and an error response will be returned. Some endpoints have lower rate limits to prevent abuse, including endpoints that poll Terraform for a list of runs and endpoints related to user authentication. The adjusted limits are unnoticeable under normal use. If you receive a rate-limited response, the limit is reflected in the x-ratelimit-limit header once triggered.

Authenticated requests are allocated to the user associated with the authentication token. This means that a user with multiple tokens will still be limited to 30 requests per second, additional tokens will not allow you to increase the requests per second permitted.

Unauthenticated requests are associated with the requesting IP address.

Status	Response	Reason
429	JSON API error object	Rate limit has been reached.

{
  "errors": [
    {
      "detail": "You have exceeded the API's rate limit.",
      "status": 429,
      "title": "Too many requests"
    }
  ]
}

Client libraries and tools

HashiCorp maintains go-tfe, a Go client for HCP Terraform's API.

Additionally, the community of HCP Terraform users and vendors have built client libraries in other languages. These client libraries and tools are not tested nor officially maintained by HashiCorp, but are listed below in order to help users find them easily.

If you have built a client library and would like to add it to this community list, please contribute to this page.

tfh: UNIX shell console app
tf_api_gateway: Python API library and console app
terrasnek: Python API library
terraform-enterprise-client: Ruby API library and console app
pyterprise: A simple Python API client library.
Tfe.NetClient: .NET Client Library