No matter how you like to participate in developer communities, Pulumi wants to meet you there. If you want to meet other Pulumi users to share use-cases and best practices, contribute code or documentation, see us at an event, or just tell a story about something cool you did with Pulumi, you are part of our community.

Pulumi Community

neither `str(vpc.cidr_block[0]['resourceRecordValue'])` nor `str(vpc.cidr_block[0].resource_record_value)` work

even though the docs say they should: <https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/programming-model/#lifting>

unless `resource_record_value` is a route53 thing. if so, it would be helpful to use more general examples

Lifting doesn't allow the object to masquerade as the underlying value in all cases -- only for basic property accesses. And even then the result of the lifting itself is an "output".

The `apply` function is generally what you want here:

```def dothing(vpc):
    vpc.cidr_block.apply(do_thing)```

A bit more detail here: <https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/programming-model/#apply>. The reason for this is that the value for a given resource property isn't always known until actually provisioning the resource.

thanks…i tried that but it’s still returning an `Output`

<https://gist.github.com/ohlol/ce75df587e7bec72641aa2805c03b241>

which is causing an issue for L4 and L22 here

(the print isn’t a big deal - just trying to validate that it’s actually a string)

if L2 is e.g. `vpc_network = ip_network('10.0.0.0/8')` it works fine

i replied in a separate thread as well, but `apply` will return an `Output`

you should think of `Output` as a promise or async task

so we don’t know necessarily know the value and so we must deal with that in an async way

in the gist you provided, `vpc_network`  is still an `Output` — if you want to print it, L3 should be `vpc_network.network_address.apply(print)`  — you’re able to reference `network_address` through lifting; the more literal way to write this would be `vpc_network.apply(lambda v: print(v.network_address))`

thanks, I get what you’re saying but in practice it doesn’t make sense. if I try `vpc_name = Output.all(tags).apply(lambda x: x[0].get('Name'))` then `vpc_name` is still an Output, but according to the docs that is lifting?

when I try to use `vpc_name` later in a formatted string it doesn’t work

&gt;   aws:ec2:SecurityGroup (&lt;pulumi.output.Output object at 0x10ed737c0&gt;-bastion-ingress):
&gt;     error: Error creating Security Group: InvalidParameterValue: Invalid security group name. Valid names are non-empty strings less than 256 characters from the following set:  a-zA-Z0-9. _-:/()#,@[]+=&amp;;{}!$*
&gt;     	status code: 400, request id: 210d586d-f079-45cd-9450-637c32c0f324

I’m either not sufficiently explaining what I want to do or it is just not possible

the call that causes that error is
```        vpc_name = Output.all(tags).apply(lambda x: x[0].get('Name')) # tags are a pulumi_aws.ec2.Vpc object tags
        name = f'{vpc_name}-bastion-ingress' 
        bastion_ingress = ec2.SecurityGroup(name,
                                            name=name,```

even if i use apply when assigning `name` it is an output

which causes an exception on the name parameter to `ec2.SecurityGroup`