Atmos GitOps and CI/CD Integrations

Overview

Atmos provides native CI/CD integration patterns for managing Terraform infrastructure through automated pipelines. The three primary integration paths are GitHub Actions, Spacelift, and Atlantis. Each approach leverages Atmos stack configurations and the atmos describe affected command to detect changes between commits or branches, enabling efficient PR-based plan and merge-based apply workflows.

All integrations follow a common GitOps pattern:

1. Detect which stacks and components changed using atmos describe affected
2. Run atmos terraform plan for each affected component/stack pair
3. Review plan output in the PR or CI/CD UI
4. Apply changes on merge (or via manual trigger / label)

Change Detection with atmos describe affected

The atmos describe affected command is the foundation of all CI/CD integrations. It compares two Git commits to produce a list of affected Atmos components and stacks.