Pulumi GitHub Actions

Pulumi’s GitHub Actions help you deploy apps and infrastructure to your cloud of choice, using nothing but code in 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 changes.

Let’s see how to get started – it’s easy!

Pre-Requisites

Before proceeding, you’ll need to Sign Up for Pulumi (if you haven’t already). This guide also assumes you’ve reviewed the GitHub Actions documentation and are generally familiar with its concepts and syntax.

For your workflow to do anything interesting, you’ll want to create a new Pulumi project for it. There are three ways to do this:

1. Clone an existing Pulumi example
2. Use the New Project wizard
3. Download the CLI and run pulumi new to select a template

Creating a Workflow

Although the full power of the Pulumi CLI is available to use with GitHub Actions, we recommend starting with our standard workflow, which consists of two workflow files, each triggered by common GitHub events:

1. Pulumi Preview runs pulumi preview in response to a Pull Request, showing a preview of the changes to the target branch when the PR gets merged.
2. Pulumi Up runs pulumi up on the target branch, in response to a commit on that branch.

Committing the Workflow Files

Let’s get started by adding these two new workflow files to the GitHub repository containing your Pulumi project.

The pull_request Workflow File

Add a new file to your Pulumi project repository at .github/workflows/pull_request.yml containing the following workflow definition, which instructs GitHub Actions to run pulumi preview in response to all pull_request events:

name: Pulumi
on:
  - pull_request
jobs:
  preview:
    name: Preview
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          fetch-depth: 1
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/[email protected]
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      - name: Install Pulumi CLI
        uses: pulumi/[email protected]
      - run: npm install
      - uses: pulumi/[email protected]
        with:
          command: preview
          stack-name: dev
        env:
          PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

The push Workflow File

Next, add a second workflow file at .github/workflows/push.yml containing the following definition, which tells GitHub to run pulumi up in response to a commit on the master branch:

name: Pulumi
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  up:
    name: Update
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          fetch-depth: 1
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/[email protected]
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      - name: Install Pulumi CLI
        uses: pulumi/[email protected]
      - run: npm install
      - uses: pulumi/[email protected]
        with:
          command: up
          stack-name: dev
        env:
          PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

Now that you’ve got these two common workflows defined, you’ll need to configure your secrets. Secrets are exposed as environment variables to the GitHub Actions runtime environment. Minimally, you’ll need to supply a Pulumi access token to allow the Pulumi CLI to communicate with the Pulumi Service on your behalf, and you’ll probably want to provide credentials for communicating with your cloud provider as well.

Configuring Your Secrets

With your workflow files committed and pushed to GitHub, head on over to your repo’s Settings tab, where you’ll find the new Secrets area:

First, create a new Pulumi Access Token, then submit that token as a new secret named named PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN. This enables your GitHub Action to communicate with the Pulumi service on your behalf.

Next, add secrets for your cloud credentials, just as you did PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN above, based on your provider of choice. For example:

• AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID, AWS_REGION and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY for AWS
• ARM_CLIENT_ID, ARM_CLIENT_SECRET, and ARM_TENANT_ID for Azure
• GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS for GCP
• KUBECONFIG for Kubernetes

Try It Out!

To try things out, simply create a Pull Request or commit, and you will see these new actions showing up in the usual GitHub Checks dialog, with a green checkmark if everything went as planned:

Click the Logs pane to see the full output of the Pulumi CLI, along with the URL of your deployment on the Pulumi Console with more details:

For even better Pull Request integration, make sure to also install our GitHub App!

Pull Request Flow

If you are using Pulumi’s GitHub Actions to preview infrastructure changes from Pull Requests, you may want to have Pulumi comment on those PRs so that you don’t need to look at the specific update logs to see if there were any changes.

There are two ways to do this: using the Pulumi GitHub App (recommended), or configuring the GitHub Actions container directly.

Pulumi GitHub App

The Pulumi GitHub App is something you install on your GitHub organization. It allows the Pulumi service to leave comments on Pull Requests but does not give it access to your source code.

Once the Pulumi GitHub App is installed, when your GitHub Actions run Pulumi, a summary of any resource changes will be left on the Pull Request, as well as links to the Pulumi Console for more detailed information.

You can install the Pulumi GitHub App now, by visiting github.com/apps/pulumi or clicking the button below.

Example comment when using the Pulumi GitHub App:

Comments By GitHub Actions

If you don’t want to use the Pulumi GitHub App, you can configure Pulumi’s GitHub Actions to copy the output of the pulumi invocation on the Pull Request. This option doesn’t have as rich an output display as the Pulumi GitHub App, as it simply copies the raw output of the Pulumi CLI.

To allow your GitHub Action to leave Pull Request comments, you’ll need to add comment-on-pr and github-token to the list of inputs passed to the action. Update the action as follows:

name: Pulumi
on:
  - pull_request
jobs:
  preview:
    name: Preview
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          fetch-depth: 1
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/[email protected]
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      - name: Install Pulumi CLI
        uses: pulumi/[email protected]
      - run: npm install
      - uses: pulumi/[email protected]
        with:
          command: preview
          stack-name: dev
          comment-on-pr: true
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        env:
          PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

Example comment when using GitHub Actions directly:

Configuration

You can configure how Pulumi’s GitHub Actions work to have more control about which stacks get updated, and when.

Using a Different Root Directory

By default, the Pulumi GitHub Action assumes your Pulumi project is in your repo’s root directory. If you are using a different root directory for your project, simply set the work-dir variable in your workflow action, with a relative path to your Pulumi project directory. For example:

name: Pulumi
on:
  - pull_request
jobs:
  preview:
    name: Preview
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 1
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      - name: Install Pulumi CLI
        uses: pulumi/action-install-pulumi-cli@v1
      - run: npm install
      - uses: pulumi/actions@v3
        with:
          command: preview
          stack-name: dev
          comment-on-pr: true
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          work-dir: infra
        env:
          PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

This tells Pulumi that the project can be found underneath the repo’s infra directory.

Stacks

Pulumi has a concept of stacks, which are isolated environments for your application (e.g., production, staging, or even distinct services).

A stack name is a required input for the Pulumi Action. You can pass a stack name using the stack-name input paramter as follows:

name: Pulumi
on:
  - pull_request
jobs:
  preview:
    name: Preview
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          fetch-depth: 1
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          node-version: 14.x
      - name: Configure AWS Credentials
        uses: aws-actions/[email protected]
        with:
          aws-access-key-id: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
          aws-region: ${{ secrets.AWS_REGION }}
          aws-secret-access-key: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
      - name: Install Pulumi CLI
        uses: pulumi/[email protected]
      - run: npm install
      - uses: pulumi/[email protected]
        with:
          command: preview
          comment-on-pr: true
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          work-dir: infra
          stack-name: dev
        env:
          PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}

Note that you’ll need to create these stacks in the usual way using the Pulumi Console or CLI. After setting this up, everything will be on autopilot.

Migrating from GitHub Action v1

If you previously used GitHub Action v1, the following are changes you should know about when migrating from v1 to v2:

• 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 used. GitHub Action v2 is able to understand if the workflow is a pull_request due to the action type.

• GitHub Action v2 now runs natively, so the action workflow needs to have the correct environment configured. For example, if you are running a NodeJS (for example) app then you need to ensure that your action has NodeJS available to it:

- uses: actions/[email protected]
  with:
    node-version: 14.x

• A .pulumi\ci.json file is no longer used for defining stacks for each branch. You need to use stack-name as described above.

For additional examples, see the sample workflows available in our Actions repository.

• GitHub Action v2 no longer runs npm ci | npm install | pip3 install | pipenv install. Please ensure that you install your dependencies before Pulumi commands are executed. For example:

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