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Publishing Pulumi packages

    Pulumi packages can be published to two different registries depending on your use case:

    • Your organization’s Private Registry in Pulumi Cloud, for components and providers used within your organization.
    • The public Pulumi Registry, for open-source packages shared with the Pulumi community.

    Publish to your organization’s private registry

    Pulumi Cloud’s Private Registry lets platform teams publish components for discovery and reuse across their organization. Published components appear in a browsable gallery with auto-generated API documentation.

    Before you begin

    1. You need a Pulumi Cloud account on the Enterprise or Business Critical plan.
    2. Your component must be pushed to a GitHub or GitLab repository that Pulumi can access. Private repositories are supported.
    3. If you haven’t built a component yet, see Build a Component. To choose the right packaging approach for your needs, see Packaging Components. For guidance on how to group multiple components into packages and repositories, see Repository strategy for Pulumi packages.

    Publish your component

    Use the pulumi package publish command to publish a component to your organization’s private registry:

    pulumi package publish github.com/<org>/<component-name>

    To publish a specific version, tag your repository and specify the version:

    git tag v1.0.0
git push origin v1.0.0
pulumi package publish github.com/<org>/<component-name>@1.0.0

    Learn more

    For the full details on component versioning, README requirements, API docs annotations, authentication with private repositories, and more, see the Private Registry documentation.

    To set up automated publishing via CI/CD, see Publishing from GitHub Actions.

    Publish to the public Pulumi Registry

    This section covers how to publish a Pulumi Package to the public Pulumi Registry. You can publish the following types of packages:

    • A component or related group of components
    • A custom provider where you define the CRUD operations for each resource type
    • A bridged provider, which wraps an existing Terraform provider and leverages its code to perform the CRUD operations for each resource type
    If you are a cloud or SaaS provider interested in publishing a Pulumi provider or component, please reach out to our partners team.

    Prerequisites

    This guide assumes you’re using GitHub to host your package’s source code and GitHub Actions to publish various parts of your package.
    • You need to install Pulumi.
    • You should be familiar with the Pulumi Resource and Component model.
    • Pulumi Packages are multi-language: you can write your package once in either Go, Python, or TypeScript/JavaScript and then make it available to all Pulumi users, even if they use another language. To develop them, you need to have Git, Go, .NET, Python, and TypeScript installed on your system.
    • To follow the whole guide, you need a GitHub account. However, using GitHub is not a requirement; you may still find this guide useful even if you use another system to store your source code.

    Create a repository and author your package

    To get started, create a repository for your Pulumi Package. We recommend hosting your Pulumi Package in a public repository on GitHub. We also recommend following the naming conventions below to help the community find the source code for your packages.

    Select a template

    We’ve created some template repositories for you to use as a starting point for your package. These templates are for provider-based packages. If you are building a cross-language component (recommended for most platform teams), see Packaging Components for the recommended approach.

    Click the link for the boilerplate repository template that you want to use, then click “Use this template” to make a copy of it.

    If you need access to a Terraform provider, but don’t need the full customization of a published provider, the “Any Terraform Provider” Pulumi Provider can provide instant access via locally generating SDKs.

    Name your provider and repository

    When you publish to the Pulumi Package Registry, you will need to pick a unique name. This is normally named after the cloud provider or service the provider configures.

    Your repository name should start with pulumi- followed by the name of your provider e.g. pulumi-aws for AWS, or pulumi-kubernetes for the Kubernetes provider.

    • If you’re bridging a Terraform provider, re-use the Terraform provider’s name - replacing terraform-provider- with pulumi- e.g. use pulumi-auth0 for bridging terraform-provider-auth0.
    • If you’re building a component on top of an existing provider, consider using the provider name followed by the component name. For example, if building an API Gateway component using the AWS provider, name your project pulumi-aws-apigateway.

    Author your resources or components

    See the instructions in your new repository’s README.md file for specific instructions on how to author your package. We also have guides you can follow for building components and providers without the template repos.

    Write documentation

    We recommend writing documentation to help others in the Pulumi community use your package. In your repository, there should be a docs/ folder containing markdown files (the templates include a few suggested pages). The files should correspond to the various tabs on a package page in Pulumi Registry (like the Azure Native package). Use the guidance in the following sections to author content in these pages.

    Overview, installation, & configuration

    Specifically, you should author a few pages:

    1. _index.md, which will be shown on the Overview tab for your package. The title of this page should match the package display name and is the heading shown on the package detail page. The Overview is a great place to include a description of what your package does, a simple example, and any other details that you want prospective users of your package to know to be successful.
    2. installation-configuration.md, which will be shown on your package’s Installation & Configuration tab. Use this page to describe how to set up your package, including authenticating to a cloud provider, and to list the configuration options that can be used with your package. The title of this page should be in the form <Package display name> Installation & Configuration.
    We recommend keeping the contents of README.md and _index.md similar or the same, save for the YAML metadata/front-matter that’s in _index.md.

    Package metadata

    Metadata for your package is generated from the schema.json in your repository. To make sure your package looks great in the Pulumi Registry, don’t forget to add metadata like:

    • displayName: the friendly name for your package displayed on the Registry’s browse page; this name should match the title of the _index.md file.
    • description: a short description of your package; it should include the package name
    • logoUrl: a web-accessible URL to a logo for your package (ideally an SVG); we recommend using the githubrawcontent.com URL for a logo stored in your package’s repository; all surrounding whitespace should be removed from the logo, and wordmarks are preferred
    • publisher: your personal/company name, as you’d like it to be shown on Registry
    • keywords:
      • category/CATEGORY: replace CATEGORY with one of cloud, database, infrastructure, monitoring, network, utility, versioncontrol
      • kind/KIND: replace KIND with one of native, component
        • Note: don’t set a kind if you’re bridging a Terraform provider
    • pluginDownloadURL: a web-accessible URL that contains the compiled binary plugin associated with your package; for more information see Publish your package
    Pulumi will interpolate ${VERSION}, ${OS} and ${ARCH} with their respective values if found in pluginDownloadURL.

    API docs

    API docs for your package are automatically generated from the schema.json in your repository. Many Pulumi users learn to use a Pulumi Package via the API docs, since they appear automatically in many IDEs’ auto-complete and inline documentation features, like Visual Studio Code’s IntelliSense feature. Investing in API docs for your package is one of the best ways to improve its usability. Check out the pulumi-eks schema to see how it translates to the Pulumi Registry for an example of great API docs.

    How-to guides

    You can also create how-to guides for your packages by contributing them to the pulumi/examples repository on GitHub.

    Publish your package

    Once you’ve authored and tested your package locally, you can publish it to make it available to the Pulumi community. You must publish several artifacts:

    The URL used to download a plugin is derived from pluginDownloadURL, as specified in the schema. Pulumi expects to find a plugin at

    ${pluginDownloadURL}/pulumi-${kind}-${name}-v${version}-${os}-${arch}.tar.gz
    • name: the name field specified in the schema
    • version: the version field specified in the schema
    • kind: the kind specified in schema, probably resource
    • os: the target operating system (one of darwin, linux, windows)
    • arch: the target system architecture (one of amd64, arm64)

    Pulumi packages consist of SDKs, as well as a binary to facilitate the actual task (creating cloud resources, etc.). Package managers (npm, NuGet, Pip, GitHub) host the SDKs, but we need to know where the plugin is hosted. When a package embeds its pluginDownloadURL, we can automatically fetch the plugin. This means that pulumi up just works, and there is no need to run pulumi plugin install ${NAME} ${VERSION} --server ${pluginDownloadURL}. If pluginDownloadURL is not supplied, then the Pulumi CLI assumes the plugin is hosted at get.pulumi.com.

    Support for GitHub releases

    Since release 3.35.3, Pulumi understands a special form of pluginDownloadURL to download plugins via GitHub releases

    github://${github api host}/{organization}[/{repository}]
    • github api host: the address of a GitHub API, for github.com this is api.github.com
    • organization: the GitHub organization to use
    • repository: the GitHub repository to use, this defaults to pulumi-${package name}

    For example the Pulumiverse Astra package would specify github://api.github.com/pulumiverse.

    Support for Gitlab releases

    Since release 3.56.0, Pulumi understands a special form of pluginDownloadURL to download plugins via Gitlab releases

    gitlab://${gitlab api host}/{<project_id>}
    • gitlab api host: the address of a Gitlab API, for Gitlab SaaS this is gitlab.com
    • project_id: the Gitlab project ID to use. The project ID can be found right below the project name on the project page.

    Publish the documentation

    All package documentation in the Pulumi Registry is published via the pulumi/registry repository on GitHub. To publish your package to the Pulumi Registry:

    1. Fork and clone the pulumi/registry repository.
    2. Add your package to the community package list
      1. Add your package’s GitHub repo slug, e.g. "checkly/pulumi-checkly"
      2. Add the path to your package’s schema.json file from the root of your provider repository, e.g. "provider/cmd/pulumi-resource-checkly/schema.json"
    3. Open a pull request with the above changes and await review from a Pulumi team member.
    API docs for your package will be automatically generated at the time of building the registry site. You do not need to take any action to generate API docs other than making sure your package repository has the right schema.json (or .yaml).

    From there, a Pulumi employee will work with you to get your Pulumi Package published. To do so, they’ll:

    1. Review your pull request and trigger the automation that builds the package listing and the API docs from your schema.
    2. Merge upon approval of your PR
    3. On merging, CI will automatically publish your package listing and API docs to pulumi.com/registry.