Preview ESC changes with draft references

Pulumi ESC makes it easy to store configuration and secrets for your Pulumi programs, and with Approvals for ESC you can review and approve changes before they go live. The new --override-env flag lets you preview any environment change, including an unapproved draft, to see exactly how it would affect your stack before it becomes the latest version.

Example scenario

Your team stores production app configuration in ESC and has enabled Approvals to keep bad values out of critical infrastructure. But one important question remains: how can reviewers properly validate a configuration change before approving it?

Introducing: draft references and the –override-env flag

We are introducing a new --override-env flag to the Pulumi CLI that works with every Pulumi operation that can consume ESC environments: preview, up, refresh, and destroy. This makes it easy to test configuration changes on the fly, giving your team the confidence to validate them as part of the review process.

Example usages

The basic usage is --override-env <env>=<replacement>, and you can override multiple environments at once! In this example, we are running a pulumi preview with environments app/myenv and app/myenv2 replaced by their draft versions (denoted by @draft:<draft-id>).

pulumi preview \
--override-env "app/myenv=app/myenv@draft:123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000" \
--override-env "app/myenv2=app/myenv2@draft:123e4567-e89b-12d3-a456-426614174000"

The --override-env flag not only works with draft references, but for any environment too! Here is an example of deploying your stack with your AWS test environment:

pulumi up --override-env "aws-login/prod=aws-login/testing"

Note: --override-env can also override environments that are imported (directly or indirectly) from the ESC environment in your stack config. This allows you to override any environment in the import chain for full flexibility.

Ways to use it

Validate a draft ESC environment with your stack before approving
One-off debugging without editing stack config

Get started

Draft references and --override-env are available today in the Pulumi CLI. Upgrade to the latest release and try it out! To learn more: