Pulumi Best Practices

Pulumi Best Practices

When to Use This Skill

Invoke this skill when:

• Writing new Pulumi programs or components
• Reviewing Pulumi code for correctness
• Refactoring existing Pulumi infrastructure
• Debugging resource dependency issues
• Setting up configuration and secrets

Practices

1. Never Create Resources Inside apply()

Why: Resources created inside apply() don't appear in pulumi preview, making changes unpredictable. Pulumi cannot properly track dependencies, leading to race conditions and deployment failures.

Detection signals:

• new aws. or other resource constructors inside .apply() callbacks
• Resource creation inside pulumi.all([...]).apply()
• Dynamic resource counts determined at runtime inside apply

Wrong:

const bucket = new aws.s3.Bucket("bucket");

bucket.id.apply(bucketId => {
    // WRONG: This resource won't appear in preview
    new aws.s3.BucketObject("object", {
        bucket: bucketId,
        content: "hello",
    });
});

Right:

const bucket = new aws.s3.Bucket("bucket");