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A First Look at Pulumi

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Last Updated:
Pulumi, AWS, Lambda

Pulumi provides open source infrastructure as code SDKs for creating, deploying, and managing infrastructure on multiple clouds in multiple languages.

Outline

All of this project’s code can be found in the First Look monorepo on my GitHub.

Introduction

Pulumi provides open source infrastructure as code SDKs that enable you to create, deploy, and manage infrastructure on numerous popular clouds in multiple programming languages.

Setup

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to write a Pulumi program that creates a serverless app serving static content with dynamic routes in AWS Lambda.

Install Pulumi CLI

Instructions for downloading the CLI will vary depending on your operating system. This tutorial will use Homebrew on MacOS.

Terminal window
brew install pulumi

Subsequent updates can be installed with brew upgrade.

Terminal window
brew upgrade pulumi

Configure AWS Credentials

Make sure you have the AWS CLI installed and an AWS account. For general use, aws configure is recommended as the fastest way to set up your AWS CLI installation.

Terminal window
aws configure

When you enter this command, the AWS CLI prompts you for four pieces of information:

  • Access key ID
  • Secret access key
  • AWS Region
  • Output format

Go to My Security Credentials to find your Access Key ID, Secret Access Key, and default region. You can leave the output format blank.

AWS Access Key ID: <YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
AWS Secret Access Key: <YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
Default region name: <YOUR_REGION_NAME>
Default output format [None]:

Login to Pulumi

Terminal window
pulumi login

You will be asked to hit <ENTER> to log in with your browser.

Manage your Pulumi stacks by logging in.
Run `pulumi login --help` for alternative login options.
Enter your access token from https://app.pulumi.com/account/tokens
or hit <ENTER> to log in using your browser

Create a New Pulumi Project

We’ll use the pulumi new command and generate a new project with the hello-aws-javascript template. It will be named ajcwebdev-pulumi with the --name flag.

Terminal window
mkdir ajcwebdev-pulumi
cd ajcwebdev-pulumi
pulumi new hello-aws-javascript --name ajcwebdev-pulumi

You will be asked to provide a description, stack name, and AWS region. I selected the default option for each.

Pulumi Yaml Files

A Pulumi project is any folder which contains a Pulumi.yaml file specifying metadata about your project. The project file must begin with a capitalized P and can use either .yml or .yaml extensions.

Pulumi.yaml
name: ajcwebdev-pulumi
runtime: nodejs
description: A simple AWS serverless JavaScript Pulumi program

The key-value pairs for any given stack are stored in your project’s stack settings file, which is automatically named Pulumi.<stack-name>.yaml.

Pulumi.dev.yaml
config:
aws:region: us-west-1

Index File

Import the pulumi/aws package. Create a public HTTP endpoint using AWS API Gateway that serves static files from the www folder using AWS S3 with a REST API served on GET /name with AWS Lambda. Finally, export the public URL for the HTTP service with exports.url = endpoint.url.

index.js
const pulumi = require("@pulumi/pulumi")
const aws = require("@pulumi/aws")
const awsx = require("@pulumi/awsx")
const endpoint = new awsx.apigateway.API("hello", {
routes: [
{
path: "/",
localPath: "www",
},
{
path: "/source",
method: "GET",
eventHandler: (req, ctx, cb) => {
cb(undefined, {
statusCode: 200,
body: Buffer.from(JSON.stringify({ name: "AWS" }), "utf8").toString("base64"),
isBase64Encoded: true,
headers: { "content-type": "application/json" },
})
},
},
],
})
exports.url = endpoint.url

HTML Index File

The project comes with a hello world example in the index.html file.

www/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Hello Pulumi</title>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.png" type="image/png">
</head>
<body>
<p>Hello, world!</p>
<p>Made with ❤️ using <a href="https://pulumi.com">Pulumi</a></p>
<p>Served from: <span id="source"></span></p>
</body>
<script>
fetch("source")
.then(response => response.json())
.then(json => {
document.getElementById("source").innerText = json.name;
});
</script>
</html>

Deploy to Pulumi Cloud

Create or update the resources in a stack with pulumi up.

Terminal window
pulumi up
Do you want to perform this update? [Use arrows to move, enter to select, type to filter]
> yes
no
details

Select yes.

Outputs:
url: "https://2inuue6w0a.execute-api.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/stage/"
Resources:
+ 22 created
Duration: 26s

Open the output’s URL, (2inuue6w0a.execute-api.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/stage/ in my case) to see your site.

01 - pulumi-boilerplate

Update HTML File

Change stuff.

www/index.html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>ajcwebdev-pulumi</title>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.png" type="image/png">
</head>
<body>
<h2>ajcwebdev-pulumi</h2>
<p>Served from: <span id="source"></span></p>
</body>
<script>
fetch("source")
.then(response => response.json())
.then(json => {
document.getElementById("source").innerText = json.name;
});
</script>
</html>

Run pulumi up again to deploy your changes.

Terminal window
pulumi up

Check back to your URL.

02 - ajcwebdev-pulumi