DevOps Dictionary

Terragrunt is a thin wrapper around Terraform that helps teams manage infrastructure code across many environments and modules by centralizing shared configuration. It works by letting you define common settings (such as remote state storage, provider configuration, and input variables) once and then reuse them through a simple folder structure and inheritance, so each environment only specifies what’s different. Terragrunt can also orchestrate running Terraform across multiple modules in the right order, reducing manual coordination.

With Terragrunt, infrastructure changes are more consistent and easier to scale across dev, staging, and production; without it, teams often copy and paste Terraform blocks, which increases drift (unintended differences between environments) and the chance of misconfigurations. This gap exists because Terraform modules are reusable, but they don’t natively provide a strong pattern for sharing environment-wide settings without duplication.