About HCL (Terraform) ↔ JSON

Convert between HCL/Terraform config and JSON. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Converters collection.

Use Cases

• DevOps engineers generating Terraform configs programmatically
• Platform teams validating infrastructure-as-code changes in CI
• Cloud architects comparing Terraform modules across environments
• Automation scripts that need to read and modify Terraform state

Tips

• Validate Terraform blocks as JSON for programmatic editing
• Use JSON output to compare Terraform configs across envs
• Convert JSON back to HCL for human-readable pull requests

Fun Facts

• HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) was created by Mitchell Hashimoto in 2014 specifically for HashiCorp tools — it combines the readability of YAML with the precision of JSON.
• Terraform supports both HCL (.tf) and JSON (.tf.json) natively, making bidirectional conversion a built-in design feature of the language.
• HCL2, released with Terraform 0.12 in 2019, added first-class expressions and for-each loops, making it a near-programming language rather than just a config format.

FAQ

What is HCL?

HashiCorp Configuration Language — the syntax Terraform, Packer, and Vault use for configuration. HCL2 supports expressions and type definitions.

Does it execute expressions?

No — the tool is a syntactic converter. `${var.name}` is preserved as a string literal. To resolve expressions, Terraform plan/validate is the right path.

What about heredoc strings?

Preserved as multi-line JSON strings. The HCL form `<<EOF ... EOF` becomes a `\n`-separated string in JSON.

Can I convert back?

Yes — JSON is a valid Terraform input format. The generated HCL style is clean but may differ in whitespace from hand-written HCL.