Hi! I'm trying out pulumi for the first time, and I'm getting warnings that

warning: using pulumi-resource-hcloud from $PATH at /nix/store/i1qr2irz3bqsdg6g5q68m6r2w23vjx32-pulumi-3.88.0/bin/pulumi-resource-hcloud

I want to understand 1. Why this situation is not desirable. 2. Why doing a

pulumi plugin install hcloud

doesn't eliminate the problem 3. What the idea is behind the env var

PULUMI_IGNORE_AMBIENT_PLUGINS

(which does remove the warning) 4. If there's a way to get rid of the warning without opting in to stack-local (if that's the right terminology) providers, since I would like to control the binaries from elsewhere, as I am right now.

This is probably a little different in Nix, but for most users, in the general case you want to use the plugins that pulumi installed itself. They’d be in

~/.pulumi/plugins/

or similar, which is not on the PATH, but pulumi knows to look there. When a plugin is found on the path, that means - outside of Nix - that it was manually downloaded or copied. That can cause unintended behavior.

I see, that aligns more or less with my predictions. As the versions are locked in pulumi-land, I'm fine with using the env var. The warning was just a little non-actionable 🙂 Thanks for clarifying!

NP!