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. You can change this during the project initiation process, but we’ll stick with the default for now.

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 typescript -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 npm.

Step 3 — Inspect Your New Project

Our project is comprised of multiple files:

  • Pulumi.yaml: your project’s metadata, containing its name and language
  • index.ts: your program’s main entrypoint file
  • node_modules/: your program’s npm dependencies
  • package.json and package-lock.json: your project’s npm dependency information
  • tsconfig.json: your project’s TypeScript configuration

Run cat index.ts to see the contents of your project’s empty program:

import * as pulumi from "@pulumi/pulumi";

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