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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:36 PM
So, I'm trying to get started with the Pulumi golang SDK and so far I'm pretty unimpressed/frustrated. Right out of the gate, all the links in the docs are broken: For instance, this is a link in the VPC docs: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v4/go/pulumi?tab=doc#IDInput ^^that goes to an error page and every link I've clicked in the Go documentation has been broken so far. I'm attempting to use the
GetVpc
call but I can't find a single example of how to declare one of the required arguments for
InputID
and again... all the links are broken. Then, I attempt to get the provider version and this is what I get....
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 6:39 PM
Hi Charles. I'm sorry this experience has been so frustrating
our SDK docs are autogenerated from types, and it looks like there's breakage here, I'll get someone to take a look
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:41 PM
I did some digging around and the latest provider version I can find is v4.12.0, so I'm not sure how to coerce the system into using that version
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 6:41 PM
with regards to your questions about
GetVpc
, if you look in the docs here, you'll see the Go SDK actually mandates
LookupVPC
- I agree it's not a great experience
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:42 PM
From the VPC docs:
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 6:43 PM
as for the versioning, we're actually in the process of releasing v4.13.0 https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi-aws/actions/runs/1038268020 It looks like you've run into a race condition whereby the SDK is published (because it uses Go modules, and the tag exists) but the release process hasn't finished publishing the binary. I'm sorry you ran into that
you'll need to pass the actual VPC id (for example, vpc-xxxxxx` as the id. The docs aren't great there, I agree with you there
I've opened an issue for this here: https://github.com/pulumi/docs/issues/6239
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:46 PM
Hmm, because of typing you can't directly load that either
At least not in the
GetVpc
call. I can pass the VPC Id as a string parameter to the containing struct for
LookupVpc
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 6:49 PM
as I mentioned earlier, the
GetX
resources are actually rarely used, because most of the time you're not going to actually know the value of the resource and want to look it up. Most folks use the
LookupVpc
methods which allows more filtering: https://github.com/pulumi/examples/blob/ca40203279f393c0c159dadcadc97c6007122997/aws-go-fargate/main.go#L21
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:51 PM
Oh, I get that. The
LookupVcp
is much easier to use, I just need to figure out how to specify which provider I want to use now. I think the docs should reflect that though rather than pointing me to the
GetVpc
call.
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 6:52 PM
agreed, and also I understand your frustration about the broken Godoc links
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:53 PM
No worries, I get that it happens. Just not a great look for someone looking to convert from Terraform to Pulumi when basically everything was broken out of the gate.
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 6:55 PM
re: the idinput problem, it seems we're incorrectly passing the wrong provider version. the link we generate is: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v4/go/pulumi#IDInput when it should be: https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/pulumi/pulumi/sdk/v3/go/pulumi#IDInput
this looks like a bug in our documentation generation, where it's pulling the provider version (pulumi-aws is on v4) rather than the pulumi SDK version. I've opened: https://github.com/pulumi/docs/issues/6240 to address it
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 6:59 PM
Excellent, thanks
Do you have any examples on how to convert this:
productionUSEast1, err := aws.NewProvider(ctx, "terraform-production", &aws.ProviderArgs{
			Region: pulumi.String("us-east-1"),
		})
So that I can use it as an input to LookupVpc?
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 7:01 PM
all resources take a provider in their options struct, give me a sec
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 7:12 PM
Ahhh, I have to wrap it. That makes sense
No I just need the provider to finish building and I think I'll be in good shape
Ok, I think I'm calling it. The type conversions are madness. Especially one like this: It's probably an easy fix but honestly, I'm already burned out trying to decode all the wild type conversions.
cannot use ctx (variable of type *pulumi.Context) as *pulumi.Context
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 8:03 PM
Sure thing, sorry you didn’t have a great experience. If you’re willing to open issues with repros we’ll get them fixed
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 8:13 PM
It's likely that it's just me not grokking it, but I've been writing Go since the 1.4 days and this is painful. I imagine the Python version is fine since you don't have to worry about types overly much. But having to write closures and generators to convert strings to things like
pulumi.StringArrayInput
with no direct built in conversions from
pulumi.StringArray
makes for really messy code. I suspect this is related to the lack of generics in Go or some janky interface declarations. It's not difficult but if I threw a junior/mid at that code they'd be lost in a heartbeat.
For example:
subnetIds                = pulumi.StringArray{
		pulumi.String("subnet-00a852a567a95c34e"),
		pulumi.String("subnet-0028f8824e50101fa"),
		pulumi.String("subnet-05fa2f619b658b49e"),
	}
Seems pretty straightforward, I don't love wrapping strings in custom types but it's easy to follow. The problem is when you're down here:
groupArgs := &rds.SubnetGroupArgs{
			SubnetIds: subnetIds,
		}
It doesn't make a lot of sense to have to build a special closure or function to have to convert a simple list of strings to the
pulumi.StringArrayInput
type. I would think that the inheritance model would you say
type StringArray interface {}
Then have the input and output methods be attached to that interface where you can populate the data and have the implementation resolve correctly whichever one it needs
I'm reading this doc and realizing that the type conversions will just be all over the place https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/inputs-outputs/
With heavy use of reflection and type coercion which has a really gnarly code smell
FWIW, I think your product is awesome! I'm really looking forward to seeing how you all succeed, I really think you will. Honestly, I'll probably come back and try again at some point. I would love nothing more than to buy your product and rip out a ton of terraform and replace it with Pulumi using actual code rather than a DSL.
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billowy-army-68599

07/16/2021, 8:24 PM
You’re right that this is due to a lack of generics. We’re excited about those because it will drastically remove a lot of the issues you’re talking about. I understand your frustration and I’ve felt it too, but it would be helpful to get some concrete, actionable issues opened so we can improve things. Regarding your RDS example with inputs, that doesn’t look like the right thing to have to do, but I’m unfortunately away for lunch now. Happy to try find the right way if needed. Appreciate the kind words at the end, and again, sorry you didn’t have a great experience
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 8:28 PM
(Don't worry about this until after lunch, take some you time!) Oh, I really find your product compelling. Seriously, in general it's really well thought out. I'd love nothing better than to be able to actually have real TDD infra. Direct me to where to open issues and I'll get them posted, maybe if I can carve out some time I'll take a crack at building a PR to solve what I'm talking about. For now here's the issue that's bothering me. I'm trying to declare a subnetgroup that will be attached to an Amazon Aurora instance (next down the list if I can get the subnetgroup defined). I have a list of subnets I want to put it in, these already exist and are defined elsewhere. So I created this variable:
subnetIds                = pulumi.StringArray{
		pulumi.String("subnet-00a852a567a95c34e"),
		pulumi.String("subnet-0028f8824e50101fa"),
		pulumi.String("subnet-05fa2f619b658b49e"),
	}
then I have:
func main() {
	pulumi.Run(func(ctx *pulumi.Context) error {
		productionUSEast1, err := aws.NewProvider(ctx, "terraform-production", &aws.ProviderArgs{
			Region: pulumi.String("us-east-1"),
		})
		if err != nil {
			return err
		}
		groupArgs := &rds.SubnetGroupArgs{
			SubnetIds: subnetIds,
		}
		_, err = rds.NewSubnetGroup(ctx, "nextgen-data",groupArgs,pulumi.Provider(productionUSEast1),
		)
		return nil
	})
}
Which I know I need to convert the
subnetIds
but that just seems..... antithetical to how it should work. Then the code is throwing an error about the
ctx
not being of type
*pulumi.Context
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bored-table-20691

07/16/2021, 9:02 PM
@brainy-rainbow-75025 I have a hunch that maybe you have some mixed versions of the Go SDK being used. I had the same error about Context when I had this by mistake (VS Code added the wrong package)
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 9:06 PM
Ohhhh, interesting
I'm using VSCode, so that could be something
Do you remember what your solution is?
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bored-table-20691

07/16/2021, 9:07 PM
I just looked at my Go imports and ensured they were all the same version
eg v3 for the Go SDK for Pulumi, v4 for the aws provider etc
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 9:08 PM
Oh, I'll be damned.
I take back all of it then, Mea Culpa. That cleared it right up
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bored-table-20691

07/16/2021, 9:09 PM
Yeah it is super confusing when it happens.
As @billowy-army-68599 said, the type conversions can be a bit annoying at times, especially for things like
Apply
, but overall, it works reasonably well, and the productivity I’ve found with having things auto-complete, getting type errors, etc has been super helpful.
and the fact that it will error when I do something wrong type-wise is a big reason why I chose to do it in Go rather than Python (and TypeScript wasn’t really an option as I did not want to deal with async)
Glad it was reasonably sorted out though 🙂
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brainy-rainbow-75025

07/16/2021, 9:23 PM
Me too! I really want to love this product and I was hoping the evaluation would go well so I could start working up budgetary docs
👍 1