hey everyone, quick question: I frequently want to have optional infrastructure for my stacks, in this instance a cron worker auto scale group that only runs in the primary region. My problem is that I want to output all my auto scale groups using

pulumi.all().apply()

and you can probably see the problem I run into. Now I could just output groups as individual constants and be done with it, which I'll likely do as I only have 4-5 autoscale groups per region, but I was wondering if anyone's ever encountered this scenario and figured out a certain code pattern to make it work? As of right now my go-to solution is to output "none" strings when trying to output arns and ids of optional infrastructure.

You want to output the ASGs.. do you mean, you want to export them as stack exports? You can use ... notation for this, and you don't need

all()

or

apply()

.

i guess it might be a little hard to follow, but I'm having difficulty with outputting things that might only exist in certain stacks, like in a primary web region

I don't know what "outputting" means in this context. If you create something conditionally, what's stopping you from "outputting" it, either conditionally or unconditionally (may be undefined)?

right so by outputting I mean exporting resources, so say I conditionally created a cron server in one web region and tried to get that output in another projects stack, that output is actually undefined for this corresponding stack but I wouldn't know that at the time the plan is made

If it's just exporting, and you want to export "all the things" without explicitly naming them all, then you can push them into an array and export the array?

ok that was my intuitive thought as well, i'll run with that idea

That said, you'll find when consuming those exports, that naming and exporting them one at a time will make life easier for the consumer of the stack (usually).

yeah that's been my usual process, and what I ended up doing with the first example, but i've gone with array exports for large collections, for instance a collection of sqs queues

If you implement your infra in a spec-first / test-first "fulfill my ultimate requirement and let my stack design evolve", you'll find how you need to access those exports before you create the code that does the exporting. This will save implementation time by designing the correct API before the implementation.

right, i'll keep that in mind as the project grows, thx for your help