Authoring and publishing Pulumi packages

This guide will take you step-by-step through creating and publishing a Pulumi Package. You can use this guide to create any type of Pulumi Package: a Native Provider, a provider bridged from an existing Terraform provider, or a Component. This guide assumes you’re using GitHub to host your package’s source code and GitHub Actions to publish various parts of your package.

Prerequisites

• 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

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

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

• Author a Native Pulumi Provider for resources or components: pulumi/pulumi-provider-boilerplate
• Bridge an existing Terraform Provider to use with Pulumi: pulumi/pulumi-tf-provider-boilerplate

Name your provider and repository

If publishing 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 for 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.

Write documentation

We recommend authoring documentation to help others in the Pulumi community use your package. In your repository, there should be a docs/ folder with a few template pages you can use that 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.

Package metadata

Metadata for your package is generated from the schema.json in your repository. To make sure your package looks great in Pulumi Registry, ensure you 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

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 and how it translates to 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 npm, NuGet, Java, and Python SDK packages to the npm Registry, the NuGet Gallery, Maven Central and the Python Package Index
  • If your package is hosted on GitHub, you may choose to use our custom Action for publishing Pulumi packages
• The Go module to your Git repository, by adding a tag, which we’ll explain in the sections below
• The binary Pulumi resource provider plugin to a binary hosting provider of your choice
• The package documentation - overview, installation & configuration, API docs, and how-to guides to Pulumi Registry

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, ect.). 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 on Pulumi Registry is published via the pulumi/registry repository on GitHub. To publish your package on 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.

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. Merge the resulting pull request in pulumi/docs that pulls the latest Registry content into pulumi.com and publishes it.

Congratulations

Congratulations on publishing your Pulumi Package!