Pulumi Native Provider Template

This repository is a boilerplate showing how to create a native Pulumi provider using:

1. pulschema to convert an OpenAPI spec to Pulumi schema
2. pulumi-provider-framework to make HTTP requests against the cloud provider API. It uses the metadata returned by pulschema as one of the outputs from converting an OpenAPI spec.

Background

Follow this link to see what a Pulumi native provider is comprised of.

A Pulumi Resource Provider:

• is a gRPC server which allows for the Pulumi engine to create resources in a specific cloud
• holds the lifecycle logic for these cloud resources
• holds a pulumi JSON schema that describes the provider
• provides language-specific SDKs so resources can be created in whichever language you prefer

When we speak of a "native" provider, we mean that all implementation is native to Pulumi, as opposed to Terraform-based providers.

Authoring a Pulumi Native Provider

This boilerplate creates a working Pulumi-owned provider named xyz.

Prerequisites

Ensure the following tools are installed and present in your $PATH:

• pulumictl
• Go 1.21 or 1.latest
• NodeJS 18.x. We recommend using nvm to manage NodeJS installations.
• Yarn
• TypeScript
• Python (called as python3)
• .NET

Creating and Initializing the Repository

Pulumi offers this repository as a GitHub template repository for convenience. From this repository:

1. Click "Use this template".
2. Set the following options:
   • Owner: <your GH organization>
   • Repository name: pulumi-xyz (replace "xyz" with the name of your provider)
     • Providers built from Cloudy Sky Software's templates are always native providers, by default.
     • However, if there is already a TF-bridged provider with that name, you should add the suffix -native so that the package name in some package registries do not conflict with the other providers.
   • Description: Pulumi provider for xyz
   • Repository type: Public
3. Clone the generated repository.

From the templated repository:

Search-replace the following occurrences with the corresponding names.

Search	Replace With
xyz	Lower-cased name of the provider
Xyz	Pascal-case name of the provider
XYZ	Upper-cased name of the provider
x_y_z	Lower snake-cased name of the provider if the provider name has multiple words

Build the provider and install the plugin

$ make build install

This will:

1. Create the SDK codegen binary and place it in a ./bin folder (gitignored)
2. Create the provider binary and place it in the ./bin folder (gitignored)
3. Generate the dotnet, Go, Node, and Python SDKs and place them in the ./sdk folder
4. Install the provider on your machine.

Test against the example

$ cd examples/simple
$ yarn link @pulumi/xyz
$ yarn install
$ pulumi stack init test
$ pulumi up

Now that you have completed all of the above steps, you have a working provider that generates a random string for you.

A brief repository overview

You now have:

1. A provider/ folder containing the building and implementation logic
   1. cmd/
      1. pulumi-gen-xyz/ - generates language SDKs from the schema
      2. pulumi-resource-xyz/ - holds the package schema, injects the package version, and starts the gRPC server
   2. pkg
      1. provider - holds the gRPC methods (and for now, the sample implementation logic) required by the Pulumi engine
      2. version - semver package to be consumed by build processes
2. deployment-templates - a set of files to help you around deployment and publication
3. sdk - holds the generated code libraries created by pulumi-gen-xyz/main.go
4. examples a folder of Pulumi programs to try locally and/or use in CI.
5. A Makefile and this README.

Implementing the provider callback methods

You will find a mostly blank implementation of these in pkg/provider/provider.go. Note that these methods do not link 1:1 to the Pulumi resource provider interface because pulumi-provider-framework provides a convenient callback mechanism and handles all other responsibilities. You should use the callback methods to alter the HTTP request (in Pre* methods) or the response (in Post*) as needed. If you don't need any customization, then you don't need to do anything at all. Yep! The framework handles it all.

Build Examples

Create an example program using the resources defined in your provider, and place it in the examples/ folder.

You can now repeat the steps for build, install, and test.

Documentation

Please follow this guide to add documentation to your provider.

Configuring CI and releases

1. Follow the instructions laid out in the deployment templates.