How to find Pulumi stack's initial deployment date?

Question

Pulumi · Accepted Answer

Pulumi does not natively support retrieving the initial deployment date of a stack. However, you can implement a workaround by storing the deployment date as a custom stack tag when you first create the stack.

Here's a program that demonstrates how to add a custom tag to a Pulumi stack. This program sets the current timestamp as a custom tag named "DeploymentDate".

```typescript
import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";

// Get the current stack
const stack = pulumi.StackReference.get(pulumi.getStack());

// Set the deployment date as a stack tag, but only if it doesn't exist yet
if (!stack.tags.apply(tags => tags.hasOwnProperty("DeploymentDate"))) {
    pulumi.log.info(`Setting DeploymentDate for the first time`);
    
    // Get the current time
    const now = new Date();

// Set the stack tag
    pulumi.Config.set("DeploymentDate", JSON.stringify(now));
} else {
    pulumi.log.info(`DeploymentDate is already set`);
}
```

To retrieve this tag and its value later, you could use pulumi.StackReference:

```typescript
import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";

// Get the current stack
const stack = pulumi.StackReference.get(pulumi.getStack());

// Get the deployment date from the stack tags
const deploymentDate = stack.tags.apply(tags => tags["DeploymentDate"]);

// Print the deployment date
deploymentDate.apply(date => {
    if (date) pulumi.log.info(`This stack was first deployed on ${date}`);
    else pulumi.log.info(`Could not find the initial deployment date of this stack`);
});
```

Please note that this solution would only work for future stacks where you implemented this mechanism, not existing stacks.