The meta-issue tracking all of this work: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/3901 Feel free to come join us in the #C019YSXN04B channel

While this does still require a pulumi binary on your path, we designed it for the specific scenario you mention. You can just run

node index.js

and everything works as expected including debugging. Here's an example program that I wrote in typescript:

import { LocalWorkspace, UpOptions } from "@pulumi/pulumi/x/automation";
import * as aws from "@pulumi/aws";

LocalWorkspace.UpsertStackInlineSource("pulumi/myBucket", "inlineNodeProject", async () => {
    const bucket = new aws.s3.Bucket("my-bucket");
    return { exp_static: "foo", abc: "def", bucketName: bucket.id };
}).then((stack) => {
    return stack.setConfig("aws:region", { value: "us-west-2" }).then(() => {
        const upOpts: UpOptions = { onOutput: (out) => { <http://console.info|console.info>(out.toString()) } };
        return stack.up(upOpts).then((res) => { console.log(res.outputs) })
    })
}).catch(err => console.log(err));