Terraformer is a reverse engineering tool and infrastructure-to-code generator that transforms existing live cloud resources into declarative configuration files and state manifests. It functions as a cloud infrastructure exporter, allowing users to extract resource metadata from cloud providers to create reproducible infrastructure deployments.
The tool specializes in reverse engineering by querying cloud provider APIs to map active resource configurations and translate them into Terraform resource blocks. It supports infrastructure state recovery by reconstructing state files from live environments when original configurations are missing, and enables the migration of manually created cloud assets into version-controlled code.
The system includes capabilities for resource import filtering and import planning to isolate specific cloud objects by type, name, or attribute. It also provides hierarchical file organization to arrange generated code into service-based folder structures and supports remote state management for uploading state files to cloud storage.