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if it was just

require()

and

get()

, how would that work in strongly typed languages? what would those methods return?

I'd be really surprised if these are equivalent. Can somebody please confirm? I don't have access to my dev machine for a few days.

@bored-oyster-3147 Like @handsome-state-59775 suggested, they are not equivalent. I was also caught by surprise about the "namespaces" and the structure of the yaml file. essentially you can get the value only from the top-level item the namespace, everything else that is nested is an object. assume project name is

project

eg:

config:
  project:key: value
  project:another:
    nested: value
  project:different:
    nested_different:
      - 1
      - 2
      - 3

# returns value
value = cfg.require('key')

# returns {"nested": value"}
another = cfg.require_object('another')

# fails to find `project:another.nested: value
another_value = cfg.require('another.nested')

I'd recommend playing around with config but in general, if you want nested config you'll have to do with

get_object

Nested configs also don't allow nested secrets because you would have to treat the whole object as a secret which forces you to use namespaces which are essentially just different keys.

@silly-forest-38049 what do you mean by the nested secret?

Like if you have

namespace:some-service-config:
  normalProperty: a
  anotherNormalProperty: b
  secretProperty:
   AdminEmail:
     secure: some-encrypted-value
   AdminPassword:
     secure: another-encrypted-value

There is no way to read the secretProperty without reading the entire

service-config

as secret So you would be forced to do this:

namespace:some-service-config:
  normalProperty: a
  anotherNormalProperty: b
namespace:someSecretProperty:
 AdminEmail:
   secure: some-encrypted-value
 AdminPassword:
   secure: another-encrypted-value

Ah so they are not equivalent in Pulumi because Pulumi treats the top as the dictionary key. In YAML, though..

Could be. This is definitely opinionated. Could be very complex but given the complexity of what actually Pulumi does I would imagine they are totally capable of handling it.

I will give you an example in the dotnet SDK. You have this shape:

aws:
  someProperty: 'a'
  somethingElse: 'b'

I have called

config.Get("aws")

What is the method signature of

config.Get(...)

? You can't have a dynamic return type in .NET. So it must be some generic type

ConfigResult

. This object would need to look something like:

class ConfigResult
{
   ConfigType Type,
   object? Value
}

Where

ConfigType

is an enum that looks something like:

enum ConfigType
{
   String,
   Int16,
   Int32,
   Int64,
   Boolean,
   Object,
   etc..
}

Ok so let's say we did our

config.Get("aws")

call. This is an object. You're suggesting that they return a strong type.

AFAIK YAML has types so they could still give you type safety in typed languages by inferring the type from YAML

In .NET that means they would have to use reflection to search all the available types that: • Matches the properties • Is accessible • Is constructible That is a really big ask and reflection has very poor performance, but let's say they accomplish it. Now your code looks like:

var config = new Pulumi.Config();
var awsConfigResult = config.Get("aws");
if (awsConfigResult.Type != ConfigType.Object)
    throw SomeException();

if (awsConfigResult.Value is not AwsConfig awsConfig)
    throw SomeException();

// now do work with awsConfig instance that is proper type

When if you had just provided the type to begin with, your code would remain:

var config = new Pulumi.Config();
var awsConfig = config.GetObject<AwsConfig>("aws");

No type searching required, no inference required, and cleaner consumer code.

To be honest the various

requireString()

and family of functions aren't really annoying me. It's mainly the namespace thing that does My config file is just growing larger and larger and being able to fold/unfold and read the configuration for a specific component in one go is what makes it attractive for me. Mainly the secrets part It's been a while that I have done some .NET but cannot you use generics to solve the problem. I am not saying it's easy but again I don't work for them and I don't know if this is the biggest deal. So a normal

get()

or

require()

could return indeed a generic

object

type by default and if you are interested in a typed option then you can provide the type as a generic parameter and Pulumi would just cast it as it is doing now with

requireObject<T>

So basically: • If you are interested in types then it's your responsibility as a consumer to specify that type and Pulumi does is cast • If you are not interested in the type then you get a generic

object

or

any

in TypeScript

Right but if you get an

object

you're still doing the defensive checking in your infra code when it could've been done in Pulumi. Meaning you would only use that overload for config that can be more than one type.

I did this:

secretProperty:
   AdminEmail:
     secure: some-encrypted-value
   AdminPassword:
     secure: another-encrypted-value

but you must use

get_secret_object

and then deal with the Output type or it is possible to get plain text values by

get_object

. IMO easiest way is to pass this responsibility from pulumi to pydantic and instantiate pydantic object instead In another language I'd use the same approach and created my own config object instead of relying on pulumi.