Configuring Plugins

You can extend TFLint by installing any plugin. Declare plugins you want to use in the config file as follows:

plugin "foo" {
  enabled = true
  version = "0.1.0"
  source  = "github.com/org/tflint-ruleset-foo"
}

After declaring the version and source, tflint --init can automatically install the plugin.

$ tflint --init
Installing "foo" plugin...
Installed "foo" (source: github.com/org/tflint-ruleset-foo, version: 0.1.0)
$ tflint -v
TFLint version 0.28.1
+ ruleset.foo (0.1.0)

See also Configuring TFLint for the config file schema.

Attributes

This section describes the attributes reserved by TFLint. Except for these, each plugin can extend the schema by defining any attributes/blocks. See the documentation for each plugin for details.

enabled (required)

Enable the plugin. If set to false, the rules will not be used even if the plugin is installed.

source

The source URL to install the plugin. Must be in the format github.com/org/repo.

version

Plugin version. Do not prefix with "v". This attribute cannot be omitted when the source is set. Version constraints (like >= 0.3) are not supported.

signing_key

Plugins are verified by default with Artifact Attestations when available. If no attestations are found, TFLint falls back to PGP signature verification using the signing_key.

If the plugin developer distributes a PGP public key, setting the signing_key will ensure that the signature of the checksum file downloaded from GitHub is signed by the key.

NOTE: Artifact Attestations will not be verified if the source is a private repository. If you want to verify signatures in a private repository, you must set the signing_key.

Plugin directory

Plugins are usually installed under ~/.tflint.d/plugins. Exceptionally, if you already have ./.tflint.d/plugins in your working directory, it will be installed there.

The automatically installed plugins are placed as [plugin dir]/[source]/[version]/tflint-ruleset-[name]. (tflint-ruleset-[name].exe in Windows).

If you want to change the plugin directory, you can change this with the plugin_dir or TFLINT_PLUGIN_DIR environment variable.

Avoiding rate limiting

When you install plugins with tflint --init, TFLint calls the GitHub API to get release metadata. By default, this is an unauthenticated request, subject to a rate limit of 60 requests per hour per IP address.

Background: GitHub REST API: Rate Limiting

If you fetch plugins frequently in CI, you may hit this rate limit. If you run TFLint in a shared CI environment such as GitHub Actions, you will share this quota with other tenants and may encounter rate limiting errors regardless of how often you run TFLint.

To increase the rate limit, you can send an authenticated request by authenticating your requests with an access token, by setting the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable. In GitHub Actions, you can pass the built-in GITHUB_TOKEN that is injected into each job.

It's also a good idea to cache the plugin directory, as TFLint will only send requests if plugins aren't installed. The setup-tflint action includes an example of caching in GitHub Actions.

If you host your plugins on GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES), you may need to use a different token than on GitHub.com. In this case, you can use a host-specific token like GITHUB_TOKEN_example_com. The hostname must be normalized with Punycode. Use "_" instead of "." and "__" instead of "-".

# GITHUB_TOKEN will be used
plugin "foo" {
  source = "github.com/org/tflint-ruleset-foo"
}

# GITHUB_TOKEN_example_com will be used preferentially and will fall back to GITHUB_TOKEN if not set.
plugin "bar" {
  source = "example.com/org/tflint-ruleset-bar"
}

Keeping plugins up to date

We recommend using automatic updates to keep your plugin version up-to-date. Renovate supports TFLint plugins to easily set up automated update workflows.

Manual installation

You can also install the plugin manually. This is mainly useful for plugin development and for plugins that are not published on GitHub. In that case, omit the source and version attributes.

plugin "foo" {
  enabled = true
}

When enabled, TFLint looks for the plugin binary following the pattern tflint-ruleset-[name] (or tflint-ruleset-[name].exe on Windows) directly in your plugins folder (e.g., ~/.tflint.d/plugins/ on Unix-like systems or C:\Users\[username]\.tflint.d\plugins\ on Windows).

Thus, with the configuration above where the plugin name is "foo", the executable must be named tflint-ruleset-foo (or tflint-ruleset-foo.exe on Windows). So you should move the binary into the plugin directory in advance.

Bundled plugin

TFLint Ruleset for Terraform Language is built directly into TFLint binary. This is called a bundled plugin. Unlike other plugins, bundled plugins can be used without installation.

A bundled plugin is enabled by default without a plugin block declaration. The default config is below:

plugin "terraform" {
  enabled = true
  preset  = "recommended"
}

You can also change the behavior of the bundled plugin by explicitly declaring a plugin block.

If you want to use a different version of tflint-ruleset-terraform instead of the bundled plugin, you can install it with tflint --init by specifying the version and source. In this case the bundled plugin will not be automatically enabled.

plugin "terraform" {
  enabled = true
  preset  = "recommended"

  version = "0.1.0"
  source  = "github.com/terraform-linters/tflint-ruleset-terraform"
}

If you have tflint-ruleset-terraform manually installed, the bundled plugin will not be automatically enabled. In this case the manually installed version takes precedence.