About

The Pulumi plugin is already being used in large projects, but is still considered experimental. Please let us know if you have any questions or if any issues come up!

Garden includes an experimental Pulumi plugin that wraps the Pulumi CLI. This way, you can incorporate Pulumi stacks into your Garden project with minimal extra configuration. The benefits of using this plugin include:

• Leveraging Garden's dependency semantics with your Pulumi stacks.

  • For example, Kubernetes actions can depend on infrastructure deployed with Pulumi (and access stack outputs via the ${actions.deploy.[pulumi-deploy-action-name].outputs}) key).

  • Deploy, preview, update, refresh or destroy Pulumi stacks in dependency order with a single command.

• Fast incremental deploys that use Garden's versioning system in combination with Pulumi stack tags to implement efficient service status checks.

We strongly recommend that you learn about Pulumi (if you haven't already) before using it with Garden.

How it works

Internally, Garden simply wraps the Pulumi CLI, calling the appropriate Pulumi CLI commands to deploy, delete or check the status of a service.

The Pulumi plugin can optionally make use of stack tags to implement fast service status checks, which can be a major boost to performance when deploying projects containing several Pulumi stacks.

Finally, the plugin defines several plugin-specific commands that let you run Pulumi commands in one or more Pulumi deploy actions in dependency order (which can be very useful for projects with several Pulumi stacks).

Deploying your Pulumi stacks

Once you've got your Pulumi deploy actions configured, they will be deployed when you run garden deploy in your project; just like any other Garden deploy!

Referencing stack outputs in other Garden actions

Pulumi stacks can define stack outputs.

These can then be read by other Pulumi stacks via stack references.

Garden's dependency graph functionality is a great fit for stack references. For example, if pulumi-deploy-action-a's Pulumi program uses a stack references to an IP address that's an output of pulumi-deploy-action-b's Pulumi program, you can add a dependency on pulumi-deploy-action-b by referencing that output:

kind: Deploy
type: pulumi
name: pulumi-deploy-action-a
spec:
  cacheStatus: true
  # Here, you should list all stack references used by this action's pulumi program.
  stackReferences:
    - ${actions.deploy.pulumi-deploy-action-b.outputs.ip-address}
  # Make sure to add a dependency on each pulumi action you're using for stack references
  # above (otherwise an error will be thrown when you deploy).
  dependencies:
    - deploy.pulumi-deploy-action-b

This ensures that Garden deploys pulumi-deploy-action-b before pulumi-deploy-action-a when running e.g. garden deploy.

If you make sure to include all stack references to Pulumi deploy actions in your project in the stackReferences field, you can safely set cacheStatus: true for your deploy action, since Garden will factor the stack output values into its version calculations.

If cacheStatus is set to false, Garden runs pulumi up on every deploy. While this is safe and easy to reason about, it's much slower and more resource-intensive than using cacheStatus = true.

This is because running pulumi up is a much more expensive operation (in terms of CPU, RAM and time used) than the calls to pulumi stack tag set/get that Garden uses when cacheStatus = true.

With that in mind, we recommend using cacheStatus = true in your pulumi deploy actions whenever possible, once you've made sure you've included all relevant stack references in your pulumi deploy action configs. However, setting cacheStatus = true is only possible for Pulumi cloud managed state backends.

Plugin commands

The pulumi plugin also comes with plugin-specific commands, which are designed to run pulumi commands in dependency order (and with access to Garden's full config/templating capabilities).

The currently available plugin commands are:

• preview

• cancel

• refresh

• destroy

• reimport Each of the above wraps the pulumi command with the same name, except for reimport (which wraps pulumi export | pulumi import—a workflow that's occasionally needed).

By default, each command runs for every pulumi deploy action in the project. Each plugin command also accepts an optional list of pulumi deploy action names as CLI arguments.

When a list of deploy action names is provided, the pulumi command will only be run for those deploy actions (still in dependency order).

For example:

garden plugins pulumi preview -- my-pulumi-deploy-action my-other-pulumi-deploy-action

Pulumi varfile schema

By default Garden uses a schema for the Pulumi varfiles that expects all content in a varfile to be values that are set under the config key in the pulumi config file. Garden will resolve any template strings in varfiles and then add them to the config section of the pulumi config file.

Example of old varfile schema:

kubernetes:context: orbstack
pulumi-k8s:namespace: ns-from-the-varfile

Since this does not allow for setting other top-level values like e.g. secretsprovider this schema has been updated and now requires config values to be referenced under the config key.

Example of new varfile schema:

secretsprovider: gcpkms://projects/xyz/locations/global/keyRings/pulumi/cryptoKeys/pulumi-secrets
encryptedkey: 123456
config:
  kubernetes:context: orbstack
  pulumi-k8s:namespace: ns-from-the-varfile

To use the new schema in a single pulumi deploy action set action.spec.useNewPulumiVarfileSchema to true. To use the new schema for all of your pulumi deploy actions set useNewPulumiVarfileSchema in your pulumi provider to true. The flag will be removed in the next major release and the new schema will be used.

Next steps

Check out the pulumi example project.

Also take a look at the pulumi provider reference and the pulumi's deploy action type reference for details on all the configuration parameters.

If you're having issues with pulumi itself, please refer to the official docs.