Pulumi GitHub Actions

Pulumi's GitHub Actions deploy apps and infrastructure to your cloud of choice, using just your favorite language and GitHub. This includes previewing, validating, and collaborating on proposed deployments in the context of Pull Requests, and triggering deployments or promotions between different environments by merging or directly committing code.

Getting Started

name: Pulumi
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
jobs:
  up:
    name: Preview
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: pulumi/actions@v6
        with:
          command: preview
          stack-name: org-name/stack-name
        env:
          PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

This will check out the existing directory and run pulumi preview.

Configuration

The action can be configured with the following arguments:

command (optional) - The command to run as part of the action. Accepted values are up (alias: update), refresh, destroy, preview and output. If unspecified, the action will stop after installing Pulumi.
stack-name (optional) - The name of the stack that Pulumi will be operating on. Use the fully quaified org-name/stack-name when operating on a stack outside of your individual account. This field is required if a command was specified.
work-dir (optional) - The location of your Pulumi files. Defaults to ./.
cloud-url - (optional) - the Pulumi backend to login to. This would be the equivalent of what would be passed to the pulumi login command. The action will login to the appropriate backend on your behalf provided it is configured with the correct access credentials for that backend.
comment-on-pr - (optional) If true, then the action will add the results of the Pulumi action to the PR. Ignored unless ${{ github.event }} type is pull_request.
comment-on-summary - (optional) If true, then the action will add the results of the Pulumi action to the GitHub step summary.
github-token - (optional) A GitHub token that has access levels to allow the Action to comment on a PR. Defaults to ${{ github.token }}
refresh - (optional) If true, preview and up commands are called with the --refresh flag.
secrets-provider - (optional) The type of the provider that should be used to encrypt and decrypt secrets. Possible choices: default, passphrase, awskms, azurekeyvault, gcpkms, hashivault. e.g. gcpkms://projects//locations/us-west1/keyRings/acmecorpsec/cryptoKeys/payroll
color - (optional) Colorize output. Choices are: always, never, raw, auto (default "auto").

Extra options

config-map - (optional) Configuration of the stack. Format Yaml string: {<key | string>: {value: <value | string>, secret: <is_secret | boolean> },}.
diff - (optional) Display operation as a rich diff showing the overall change.
comment-on-pr-number - (optional) If set to a number, then the action will add the results of the Pulumi action to the specified PR number.
edit-pr-comment - (optional) Edit previous PR comment instead of posting new one. PLEASE NOTE: that as of 3.2.0 of the Action, this now defaults to true. This is in an effort to reduce verbosity - if you want to have a comment per PR run, please ensure that you set this to false.
expect-no-changes - (optional) Return an error if any changes occur during this update.
message - (optional) Optional message to associate with the update operation.
parallel - (optional) Allow P resource operations to run in parallel at once (1 for no parallelism). Defaults to unbounded.
policyPacks - (optional) Run one or more policy packs with the provided command. Multiple values can be specified one per line (example: <value | string>,...).
policyPackConfigs - (optional) Path(s) to JSON file(s) containing the config for the policy pack with the corresponding "policy-pack" argument. Multiple values can be specified one per line (example: <value | string>,...).
pulumi-version - (optional) Install a specific version of the Pulumi CLI. Defaults to "^3". Specifying a version range will ensure a version within that range is installed. Use "latest" to fetch the latest published release or "dev" to download the latest development pre-release.
pulumi-version-file - (optional) File containing the version of the Pulumi CLI to install. Example: .pulumi.version. Only one pulumi-version or pulumi-version-file should be provided.
remove - (optional) Removes the target stack if all resources are destroyed. Used only with destroy command.
replace - (optional) Specify resources to replace. Multiple resources can be specified one per line (example: <value | string>,...).
target - (optional) Specify a single resource URN to update. Other resources will not be updated. Multiple resources can be specified one per line (example: <value | string>,...).
target-dependents - (optional) Allows updating of dependent targets discovered but not specified in target.
upsert - (optional) Allows the creation of the specified stack if it currently doesn't exist. PLEASE NOTE: This will create a Pulumi.<stack-name>.yaml file that you will need to add back to source control as part of the action if you wish to perform any further tasks with that stack.
exclude-protected - (optional) Skip destroying protected resources. Only valid when command is destroy.
suppress-outputs - (optional) Suppress display of stack outputs (in case they contain sensitive values).
suppress-progress - (optional) Suppress display of periodic progress dots to limit logs length.
plan - (optional) Used for update plans
- On preview: Where to save the update plan. If you choose to use this in a different run of your workflow (let's say you create an update plan via a preview on Pull Request creation and want to up using the plan) you must upload the plan as an artifact, and retrieve it wherever you run up
- On up: Where to read the update plan from.
always-include-summary - (optional) If true, then the action will trim long pr comments from the front instead of the back. This ensures that the resources summary is always included in the comment.

By default, this action will try to authenticate Pulumi with Pulumi Cloud. If you have not specified a PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN then you will need to specify an alternative backend via the cloud-url argument.

Installation Only

If you want to only install the Pulumi CLI, omit the command field of the action.

- uses: pulumi/actions@v6

This will install Pulumi and exit without performing any other operations.

Stack Outputs

Stack outputs are available when using this action. When creating a stack as follows:

package main

import (
	random "github.com/pulumi/pulumi-random/sdk/v2/go/random"
	"github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v2/go/pulumi"
)

func main() {
	pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error {
		p, err := random.NewRandomPet(ctx, "my-user-name", &random.RandomPetArgs{})
		if err != nil {
			return err
		}
		ctx.Export("pet-name", p)
		return nil
	})
}

We can see that pet-name is an output. To get the value of this output in the action, we would use code similar to the following:

- uses: pulumi/actions@v6
  id: pulumi
  env:
    PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE }}
  with:
    command: up
    cloud-url: gs://my-bucket
    stack-name: org-name/stack-name
- run: echo "My pet name is ${{ steps.pulumi.outputs.pet-name }}"

the pet-name is available as a named output

Run echo "My pet name is pretty-finch"

Referencing Sensitive Values

We suggest that any sensitive environment variables be referenced using GitHub Secrets, and consuming them using the secrets attribute on your workflow's action.

Example workflows

The Pulumi GitHub action uses the Pulumi Automation API in order to coordinate the Pulumi operations. This means that there is no supporting functionality for npm or pip installs. This functionality should be deferred to the correct GitHub Marketplace actions that support it.

Release Cadence

As of v3.18, we are intending to move to a monthly cadence for minor releases. Minor releases will be published around the beginning of the month. We may cut a patch release instead, if the changes are small enough not to warrant a minor release. We will also cut patch releases periodically as needed to address bugs.

Migrating from v5

v6 of the Pulumi Action updates the behavior of the refresh option. Previously, if refresh was true, the action would run pulumi refresh before the desired command. In v6, the pulumi up and pulumi preview commands will be run with the --refresh flag if refresh is true.

Migrating from v4

v5 of the Pulumi Action updates the NodeJS runtime from Node 16 to Node 20. Users of GitHub Enterprise will have to upgrade to v3.6 or newer. All other users are unaffected.

Migrating from v3

v4 of the Pulumi Action updates the NodeJS runtime from Node 12 to Node 16. Users of GitHub Enterprise will have to upgrade to v3.4 or newer. All other users are unaffected.

Migrating from GitHub Action v1 and v2

Here are some pointers when migrating from v1 to v2 of our GitHub Action.

The following inputs have changed from environment variables to action inputs:
- PULUMI_ROOT is now work-dir
- PULUMI_BACKEND_URL is now cloud-url
- COMMENT_ON_PR is now comment-on-pr
- GITHUB_TOKEN is now github-token
IS_PR_WORKFLOW is no longer a viable input. The action is able to understand if the workflow is a pull_request due to action type
The action now runs natively, so the action workflow needs to have the correct environment configured. There are sample workflows available. For examples, if you are running a NodeJS (for example) app then you need to ensure that your action has NodeJS available to it:

- uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
  node-version: 14.x

The action will no longer run npm ci | npm install | pip3 install | pipenv install. Please ensure that you are installing your dependencies before Pulumi commands are executed, e.g.:

- run: pip install -r requirements
  working-directory: infra