Why, when I try and delete a specific resource with the --target property, does Pulumi complain that it can't delete it without deleting the child resource X? If I am telling it to delete the parent resource then I want it to delete all the child resources

You need

--target-dependents

So the interesting part is that

--target-dependents

doesn't always work. Is this a matter of explicitly naming

dependsOn

perhaps?

yeah, I have tried with --target-dependants but it gives the same error. I have lots of dependants so listing each one is not really feasible

--target-dependents

should just be a flag you shouldn't need to list your dependents.... are any of your dependents

protect: true

maybe?

--target-dependents

gives me the same error about child resources, the only way to get Pulumi to delete it is to list every child resource using the

--target

property. None of the resources are protected

ahh ok so in pulumi

children

is not necessarily the same as

dependents

. For instance a

ComponentResource

can have many children but those children don't depend on the parent

ComponentResource

. Since pulumi effectively has 2 separate resource graphs. The first graph is the parent/child graph, which is the one built from the

parent

property and is used mostly for display purposes. Unless otherwise specified, the

parent

will default to the

stack

the resource belongs to or the

provider

that was used to deploy it if one was explicitly provided. The second graph is the dependency graph, which is necessarily separate because a resource can depend on more than 1 resource - so that relationship is many:1 while a parent/child relationship is 1:many. Dependencies, unless explicitly specified via the

dependsOn

property, are inferred by all of the

Output<T>

instances being passed around. So if this is by chance a

ComponentResource

that you are trying to destroy, then it might be that in order to have the

--target-dependents

function as expected you may need to explicitly specify

dependsOn: this

on all of the children as well, which will make the children explicitly dependents of the containing

ComponentResource

. If what you are trying to delete is not a

ComponentResource

, than maybe this understanding will help you spot which of the children doesn't actually depend on the resource you're trying to delete.

ah ok, yes this is a component resource. I have made the resources the child of the component resource, but they are not dependent so that is probably the issue.