Am i misunderstanding aliases? A resource with

name="my-name"

shows no changes detected for

pulumi up

, yet that same resource with

opts=ResourceOptions(aliases=[Alias(name="my-name")]}

instead wants to do a "replace" based on a detected name change

Hey! Not sure what you’re hitting here, but there’s some details on aliases in our programming model docs.

do i have to explicitly declare a new

name

value when i move the old one to

aliases

? can't transition to auto-generated names?

Huh, good question. Do you have a code sample where this is failing? Auto-naming happens for specific properties of a resource, not the resource name. The resource name is always required. So for instance:

bucket = s3.Bucket("my-bucket")

would use autonaming to create a bucket named

my-bucket-[random-integers]

If you wanted to change the resource name of the bucket without replacing it you would do something like:

bucket = s3.Bucket("new-bucket-name", opts=ResourceOptions(aliases=[Alias(name="my-bucket")])

Originally, it was:

aws.dynamodb.Table(
    "foo",
    attributes=[aws.dynamodb.TableAttributeArgs(name="bar", type="S")],
    hash_key="bar",
    billing_mode="PAY_PER_REQUEST",
    opts=pulumi.ResourceOptions(
        protect=True
    ),
)

Then a resource called "foo-e876689" was created. After successfully importing the resource into a new project/stack, i wanted to remove the explicit

name

value, to keep the code generic. i tried using aliases for this:

aws.dynamodb.Table(
    "foo",
    attributes=[aws.dynamodb.TableAttributeArgs(name="bar", type="S")],
    hash_key="bar",
    billing_mode="PAY_PER_REQUEST",
    opts=pulumi.ResourceOptions(
        protect=True, aliases=[pulumi.Alias(name="foo-e876689")]
    ),
)

But if i remove

name="foo-e876689"

it doesn't know to not replace, even with the alias defined. Only this works:

aws.dynamodb.Table(
    "foo",
    name="foo-e876689",
    attributes=[aws.dynamodb.TableAttributeArgs(name="bar", type="S")],
    hash_key="bar",
    billing_mode="PAY_PER_REQUEST",
    opts=pulumi.ResourceOptions(
        protect=True,
    ),
)

I think you might be able to use the ignoreChanges resource option for the

name

property.

i will take a look- thanks