Pulumi CI/CD & CircleCI

This page details how to use CircleCI to deploy Pulumi stacks.

You can refer to CircleCI’s documentation for information on how to configure your CircleCI jobs and workflows.

When it comes to integrating Pulumi, just like Like other CI/CD services, it is generally a matter of downloading the Pulumi command-line tool and running pulumi up from within the CircleCI environment. However, Pulumi Orbs for CircleCI enable a standard way to do this integration, without needing any custom scripting.

Pulumi Orbs

The Pulumi orbs for CircleCI takes care of the mechanics of downloading and installing the Pulumi command-line tool, so that you can just focus on the specific steps to deploy your stacks within your CircleCI configuration.

For the most up-to-date information about Pulumi orbs, refer to the Pulumi page within the CircleCI orb registry at https://circleci.com/orbs/registry/orb/pulumi/pulumi.

The following CircleCI config.yaml shows the Pulumi orbs in-action. It references the pulumi/pulumi@1.0.0 orb package, and then downloads starts Pulumi using the pulumi/login orb, and finally updates a stack using the pulumi/update orb.

version: 2.1
orbs:
  pulumi: pulumi/pulumi@1.0.0
jobs:
  build:
    docker:
      - image: circleci/node:16.15
    working_directory: ~/repo
    steps:
      - checkout
      - pulumi/login
      - run:
          command: |
            npm install
            npm run build            
      - pulumi/update:
          stack: website-prod

Integrating Pulumi into CircleCI starts with the pulumi/login orb, which will take care of downloading the Pulumi command-line tool if it is not on the current $PATH. It will then run pulumi login using available credentials.

You can either specify the Pulumi access token with the access-token parameter, or default to using the $PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable. Using the environment variable is preferred, as you can secure store that using secure project-level configuration within CircleCI.

Reference

The full reference documentation for the Pulumi orbs can be found along side their source code on Github.