3.1 Creating a New Project

Infrastructure in Pulumi is organized into projects. Each project is a single program that, when run, declares the desired infrastructure for Pulumi to manage.

Step 1 — Create a Directory

Each Pulumi project lives in its own directory. Create one now and change into it:

mkdir iac-workshop-ecs
cd iac-workshop-ecs

Pulumi will use the directory name as your project name by default. To create an independent project, simply name the directory differently.

Step 2 — Initialize Your Project

A Pulumi project is just a directory with some files in it. It’s possible for you to create a new one by hand. The pulumi new command, however, automates the process:

pulumi new python -y

This will print output similar to the following with a bit more information and status as it goes:

Created project 'iac-workshop-ecs'
Created stack 'dev'
Saved config
Installing dependencies...
Finished installing dependencies

Your new project is ready to go!

This command has created all the files we need, initialized a new stack named dev (an instance of our project), and installed the needed package dependencies from PyPi.

Step 3 — Inspect Your New Project

Our project is comprised of multiple files:

  • __main__.py: your program’s main entrypoint file
  • requirements.txt: your project’s Python dependency information
  • Pulumi.yaml: your project’s metadata, containing its name and language
  • venv: a virtualenv for your project

Run cat __main__.py to see the contents of your project’s empty program:

"""A Python Pulumi program"""

import pulumi

Feel free to explore the other files, although we won’t be editing any of them by hand aside from requirements.txt.