Hi, I'm trying to import some existing resources into pulumi state. When I run

pulumi up

, it complains that it can't create the resource (as it already exists). Based on https://www.pulumi.com/blog/repairing-state-with-pulumi-refresh/ I was expecting to be able to use

pulumi refresh

to import the existing resource into the state, however

pulumi refresh

command doesn't even seem to see the resource group or storage account, and doesn't seem to do anything. Any ideas why the refresh command isn't seeing any resources to refresh? pulumi up:

Enter your passphrase to unlock config/secrets
    (set PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE or PULUMI_CONFIG_PASSPHRASE_FILE to remember):
Previewing update (dev):
     Type                                     Name             Plan
     pulumi:pulumi:Stack                      pulumi-test-dev
 +   ├─ azure-native:resources:ResourceGroup  resourceGroup    create
 +   └─ azure-native:storage:StorageAccount   storage          create

Resources:
    + 2 to create
    1 unchanged

Do you want to perform this update? yes
Updating (dev):
     Type                                     Name             Status                  Info
     pulumi:pulumi:Stack                      pulumi-test-dev  **failed**              1 error
 +   └─ azure-native:resources:ResourceGroup  resourceGroup    **creating failed**     1 error

Diagnostics:
  azure-native:resources:ResourceGroup (resourceGroup):
    error: cannot create already existing subresource '/subscriptions/REDACTED/resourcegroups/AC-PulumiTest-dev'

  pulumi:pulumi:Stack (pulumi-test-dev):
    error: update failed

Resources:
    1 unchanged

Duration: 5s

pulumi refresh

Previewing refresh (dev):
     Type                 Name             Plan
     pulumi:pulumi:Stack  pulumi-test-dev

Resources:
    1 unchanged

Do you want to perform this refresh?
No resources will be modified as part of this refresh; just your stack's state will be.
 yes
Refreshing (dev):
     Type                 Name             Status
     pulumi:pulumi:Stack  pulumi-test-dev

Resources:
    1 unchanged

resource in Program.cs

var config = new Pulumi.Config();
    var shortName = config.Require("shortName");
    ResourceGroup resourceGroup = new("resourceGroup", new()
    {
        ResourceGroupName = $"AC-PulumiTest-{shortName}"
    });

Hi, to import you’ll either need to run the

pulumi import

command or the add the id to the resource. There’s some guidance on what to do (I would use the

pulumi import

command personally) on this page: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/using-pulumi/adopting-pulumi/import/

Thanks, I'll give that a go. I am a bit confused though, based on "The Solution" section of https://www.pulumi.com/blog/repairing-state-with-pulumi-refresh/ blog post, I was expecting

pulumi refresh

to interactively walk me through the imports I needed Are these two different kinds of imports?

Are you talking about “out of band” changes?

Thanks for clarifying that. Is there a technical reason why

pulumi refresh

couldn't detect these changes, or is simply something that hasn't been written. I'm coming with a lot of familiarity deploying with ARM / bicep templates which don't include a state file, so I'm still trying to wrap my head around what the state file is doing)

Do you mean why doesn’t refresh know about resources that you want to import?

yup

Pulumi can only refresh what it knows about, i.e. what’s in the state. It can’t just look through Azure and hoover up all the resources that you can read in Azure Azure kinda has state in that the whole of the ARM API is the state.

ah ok, I think I see.

pulumi refresh

is purely looking at the state. And because pulumi's initial creation never got far enough to insert into the statefile,

pulumi refresh

never knows about the other resources. My thinking was that since

plumui up

knew enough about what resource to create (and that conflicted), that it could therefore be able to work out the specific resource to import. However I never see a call to

dotnet build

when running

pulumi refresh

, so it never has any of that information available to it.

exactly