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do you mean that you are unit testing the other stacks? because if so you should be able to mock it without spinning it up

No they're integration(examples) style tests

ok so what do you mean when you ask "what is the best way"? Do you have concerns with just spinning it up?

I figured I can't be the only one with layers of stacks where a previous layer is needed to build the next layer and test it.

I'm not sure what

integration.ProgramTestManualLifeCycle

is - is that a pulumi SDK thing or is that related to the CI/CD you are using? I didn't find it in the pulumi repo. Anyways I don't think Pulumi will have a canonical answer regarding this for you.. I would wager it is largely up to you. Personally I would keep a "CI/CD" related stack of the network project up and running so the pipelines for my child projects could test against it while remaining isolated to running the child project code. But I'd guess that could add up if you have many nested stack dependencies

oh sweet. Sorry I use the .NET SDK and I'm not sure something like that exists. It looks like it lets you execute pulumi commands though, could you use that to get your stack output via

pulumi stack output

?

Pulumi’s automation API can be used to orchestrate stacks: https://www.pulumi.com/docs/guides/automation-api/ This would allow you can sequence the stacks as you need to.