pulumi up Command Reference

Deploy the resources in a Pulumi program to a selected stack.

pulumi up reconciles your program against the current stack state and creates, updates, or deletes resources to match. In CI you run it non-interactively against a fixed stack.

What it does

pulumi up evaluates your Pulumi program, computes a diff against the stack state, shows a preview, and applies the changes after confirmation. It is the core deploy command, equivalent in role to terraform apply.

Common flags and usage

--yes / -y: skip the interactive confirmation prompt (required in CI)
--skip-preview: apply without rendering the preview first
--stack / -s NAME: select the target stack explicitly
--non-interactive: never prompt; fail instead of asking
--refresh: refresh state from the provider before updating
--message: attach an update message visible in the Pulumi service

Example

shell

# .github/workflows/pulumi.yml
- name: Pulumi Up
  env:
    PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN }}
  run: |
    pulumi stack select prod
    pulumi up --yes --non-interactive --stack prod

In CI

Always pass --yes and --non-interactive so a missing input fails fast instead of hanging on a prompt. Authenticate with PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN from secrets, or use OIDC against a cloud provider for resource credentials. Select the stack explicitly so the deploy never targets the wrong environment.

Key takeaways

pulumi up applies your program to a stack; it is the main deploy command.
Pass --yes and --non-interactive in CI so it never waits on a prompt.
Authenticate with PULUMI_ACCESS_TOKEN from secrets and select the stack explicitly.