pulumi up: Usage, Options & Common CI Errors

Create or update your infrastructure to match your Pulumi program.

pulumi up (alias pulumi update) previews and then applies the changes needed to bring real infrastructure in line with your program. In CI you run it non-interactively with --yes against a selected stack.

What it does

pulumi up evaluates your program, diffs the desired state against the stack’s last known state, shows the plan, and - after confirmation - performs the create/update/delete operations. The result is recorded in the stack’s state in your configured backend (Pulumi Cloud or self-managed).

Common usage

# Interactive deploy (asks to confirm)
pulumi up

# CI: skip the prompt, target a stack explicitly
pulumi up --yes --stack acme/prod

# Preview-then-apply a saved plan, with concurrency cap
pulumi up --yes --skip-preview --parallel 10

Common error in CI: not logged in / no stack selected

CI aborts with "error: getting secrets manager: no Pulumi.<stack>.yaml" or "error: PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN must be set" or hangs on the confirmation prompt. Fix: set PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN (or run pulumi login) so the backend is authenticated, select the stack with pulumi stack select <org>/<stack> or pass --stack, and always pass --yes (and optionally --non-interactive) so up never waits for input. For self-managed state, run pulumi login s3://... or set PULUMI_BACKEND_URL.

Key options

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