Pulumi ESC: Open Approvals

Pablo Terradillos — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 16:00:00 -0300

Many teams live with the fear that a production environment might be accidentally opened, exposing credentials or sensitive systems before anyone even notices.

We’re excited to announce a new feature for Pulumi ESC: Open approvals. A governance capability that lets organizations require review and sign-off before an environment is opened (i.e. activated or exposed)

Expanding on our mission to enforce compliance and security without slowing teams down

You may recall that earlier this year we introduced Approvals for updates, which allows teams to require review and sign-off before applying modifications to environment configurations. We are now extending Pulumi ESC auditing and governance capabilities to enable Just in time (JIT) access control.

Many organizations require more robust guardrails around when an environment becomes active or accessible. Open Approvals introduces a gate before environment activation, enforcing that every environment open is intentional, reviewed, and governed.

Open Approvals introduces a gate before environment activation, enforcing that every environment open is intentional, reviewed, and governed.

How it works

When configuring Approvals gates for your environments under Settings → Approval Rulesets, you can now gate Open actions in addition to Updates. From this very same UI, you can define the approvals requirements:

Number of required reviewers
Specific teams or individuals allowed to approve
Whether self-approval is permitted

Once a ruleset is defined, all open operations in the corresponding environment will require to be approved before proceeding.

To create an open request, users need to specify the approval duration, how long they need access after opening the environment, and a description explaining why access is needed.

Approvals can be later review and approved from the Approvals tab.

A request access can also be created from the CLI via the newly introduced pulumi env open-request command.

$ pulumi env open-request org/project/env --access-duration-seconds=2h --grant-expiration-seconds=1h

Closing notes

Open approvals expands on Pulumi ESC support for compliance and governance capability while we stay true to our goal: empower teams to move fast while staying secure and compliant: no matter where or how changes happen.

We’re excited about what’s ahead and look forward to building it together with your feedback.

You can learn more about Approvals in Pulumi ESC Docs.

Announcing Doppler Providers for Pulumi ESC: Dynamic Login and Dynamic Secrets

Robert Harris — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to announce support for Doppler within Pulumi ESC! Pulumi ESC centralizes secrets and configuration management, providing a unified source of truth across your environments. With the addition of Doppler, a popular secrets management platform, ESC further extends its ecosystem, enabling seamless and secure access to secrets stored across diverse systems.

This release introduces two distinct dynamic providers for Doppler, each designed to improve security and streamline your workflows:

doppler-login (Dynamic Login): This provider securely generates short-lived OIDC access tokens for authenticating to Doppler. Static, long-lived credentials are a significant security risk. The doppler-login provider directly addresses this by generating temporary, just-in-time credentials using OIDC. Use this provider when you need temporary credentials to interact directly with Doppler, for instance, using the Doppler CLI or SDKs in local development or CI/CD pipelines, without storing long-lived static tokens. ESC manages the OIDC flow, providing a fresh token when needed.
doppler-secrets (Dynamic Secrets): This provider dynamically fetches secrets stored within your Doppler configs and makes them available within the Pulumi ESC environment. Use this provider when you need specific secrets from Doppler to configure your applications or infrastructure managed via ESC. This centralizes secret consumption, allowing you to access Doppler secrets using the same consistent ESC patterns used for AWS, Azure, GCP, Infisical, Vault, 1Password, and more.

Pulumi ESC acts as a robust secrets broker provider consistent API interface for all your tools, applications and workflows. It securely handles both the generation of temporary authentication credentials (like with doppler-login) and the fetching of application secrets (like with doppler-secrets) from various providers such as Doppler, cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP), and other secret managers (Infisical, Vault, 1Password). Once centralized in ESC, these secrets and configurations are consistently available for you to consume via ESC’s many developer friendly methods including the ESC SDK, Pulumi CLI, Kubernetes External Secrets Operator, CSI Driver, or sync them to various platforms where they are needed such as GitHub Secrets, AWS Secrets Manager, and more!

Getting Started: Using the Doppler Providers

Let’s walk through how to configure and use each provider.

Prerequisites

Your Doppler workplace must be on the Team or Enterprise plan in order to use OIDC (via service account identities).

Configure Doppler for OpenID Connect(OIDC) before you try out the providers. Follow the steps in Doppler OIDC documentation. This involves creating a Service Account Identity in Doppler, with OIDC authentication pointing to https://api.pulumi.com/oidc, and configuring the audience and subject claims. Note down the Identity ID.

Create a Pulumi ESC environment (e.g., pulumi-org/doppler-auth/oidc-login) with the following environment definition and update the identityId.

# Environment: pulumi-org/doppler-auth/oidc-login
values:
 doppler:
 # Configure the Dynamic Login provider using OIDC
 login:
 fn::open::doppler-login:
 oidc:
 identityId: <your-identity-id> # Replace with your Doppler Identity ID

 # Expose the token as an environment variable for easy consumption
 environmentVariables:
 DOPPLER_TOKEN: ${doppler.login.accessToken}

Save the environment.
Validate the environment by clicking on Open in the Pulumi Cloud console, or running pulumi env open pulumi-org/doppler-auth/oidc-login in your CLI. The output will include the doppler.login.accessToken.

Usage Example: Run Doppler CLI commands dynamically:

pulumi env run pulumi-org/doppler-auth/oidc-login -- doppler secrets download --no-file --format=json --project=<your-project-id> --config=<your-config-id>
# The DOPPLER_TOKEN env var is automatically injected

How to Use the doppler-secrets Provider (Dynamically Fetching Secrets)

Use this provider to pull secrets from Doppler into your ESC environment for consumption by your applications, CI/CD systems, Pulumi IaC, Terraform and more!

Create an ESC environment where you need the secrets (e.g., pulumi-org/my-app/dev).
Import the dynamic login environment (if using OIDC for authentication, which is recommended). This makes the temporary Doppler token available.
Configure the doppler-secrets provider, referencing the imported login details. See example below.

Specify the secrets to fetch using the get block. Replace placeholders.

# Environment: pulumi-org/my-app/dev
imports:
 # Import the environment performing Dynamic Login (recommended)
 - pulumi-org/doppler-auth/oidc-login # Use the path to your login environment

values:
 # Define a structure to hold secrets fetched from Doppler
 dopplerSecrets:
 fn::open::doppler-secrets:
 # Authenticate using the token from the imported Dynamic Login environment
 login: ${doppler.login} # Pass the login object from the import
 # Specify the Doppler project and config to retrieve secrets from
 project: example-project
 config: dev
 # Specify secrets to retrieve from Doppler
 get:
 # Define names for the secrets as they will appear in ESC's output under 'dopplerSecrets'
 apiKey: # This is the name within ESC
 name: API_KEY # The name of the secret in Doppler
 appSecret: # Pull another secret into ESC
 name: APP_SECRET

 # Optionally, map fetched secrets to environment variables for application consumption
 environmentVariables:
 API_KEY: ${dopplerSecrets.apiKey}
 APP_SECRET: ${dopplerSecrets.appSecret}

Save the environment.
Validate the environment by clicking on Open in the Pulumi Cloud console, or running pulumi env open pulumi-org/my-app/dev in your CLI. The output will show the imported doppler.login, the fetched secrets under dopplerSecrets, and the mapped environmentVariables.

Usage Example: Run an application that needs these secrets:

pulumi env run pulumi-org/my-app/dev -- node app.js
# The API_KEY and APP_SECRET env vars are automatically injected

Conclusion

The new doppler-login and doppler-secrets providers for Pulumi ESC offer powerful and secure ways to interact with Doppler. Use doppler-login for dynamic, short-lived OIDC authentication when interacting directly with Doppler APIs or CLIs. Use doppler-secrets to securely fetch secrets from Doppler into your centralized ESC environment. Together, they enhance your security posture and simplify configuration management.

We encourage you to explore these new capabilities. Dive into the doppler-login, doppler-secrets for detailed configuration options, check out the broader Pulumi ESC Documentation, and share your feedback or ask questions in the Pulumi Community Slack.

Pulumi Blog: Robert Harris