also, default values in Pulumi.yaml seem to not work?

There is not a concept of "default values in Pulumi.yaml". Curious what led you to think there was? In practice, in the current model, you just put defaults in your program - like:

let config = new pulumi.Config()
let thing = config.get("thing") || "defaultThing";

all the yaml files looks like this in the example repo:

yeah, so I'm not sure what that means or how to use it?

I see - yes - that is currently just part of the template (

pulumi new

) functionality - which drives the prompts you see during a

pulumi new

operation. This is slightly more clear if you expand the screenshot a little - but definitely understand the confusion. We do expect to make some improvements generally around config in the not-too-distant future - see https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/issues/1052.

ok, from reading that I assume that the values in the yaml file do not work yet?

Pulumi.yaml

is not used for configuration. The current configuration values are stored in

Pulumi.<stackname>.yaml

(confusing that these have similar names - the two files are completely unrelated). Defaults and how the config is used/interpreted is entirely up to the program. Note that this is related to the use of "code" vs. "configuration DSLs" - we lean on the code to do as much of the work as possible.

ok, if its not used for configuration, why all examples specify default values for config parameters in it? 🙂 what do those mean? or what are those used for (if anything at all?)

Those are in a

template

section which is used when templates are installed via

pulumi new

, or via

New Project

in the Pulumi console.