Command: refresh

The tofu refresh command reads the current settings from all managed remote objects and updates the OpenTofu state to match.

This won't modify your real remote objects, but it will modify the OpenTofu state.

You shouldn't typically need to use this command, because OpenTofu automatically performs the same refreshing actions as a part of creating a plan in both the tofu plan and tofu apply commands. This command is here primarily for backward compatibility, but we don't recommend using it because it provides no opportunity to review the effects of the operation before updating the state.

Usage​

Usage: tofu refresh [options]

This command is effectively an alias for the following command:

tofu apply -refresh-only -auto-approve

Consequently, it supports all of the same options as tofu apply except that it does not accept a saved plan file, it doesn't allow selecting a planning mode other than "refresh only", and -auto-approve is always enabled.

Automatically applying the effect of a refresh is risky. If you have misconfigured credentials for one or more providers, OpenTofu may be misled into thinking that all of the managed objects have been deleted, causing it to remove all of the tracked objects without any confirmation prompt.

Instead, we recommend using the following command in order to get the same effect but with the opportunity to review the changes that OpenTofu has detected before committing them to the state:

tofu apply -refresh-only

This alternative command will present an interactive prompt for you to confirm the detected changes.