I ran into an interesting issue yesterday while importing a resource, and wanted to see if it was expected. Our stack uses an explicit AWS provider (so not the default one, which we’ve disabled since 3.23.0), and I need to import an RDS cluster. I ran the following command:

pulumi import "aws:rds/cluster:Cluster" my-rds-cluster "rds-cluster-name"

and I got an error saying the RDS cluster did not exist. After a while, I figured out it was just using the implicit AWS credentials I have on my machine, which are going to our main account (which doesn’t have this resource in it), as opposed to our prod account. So I created a profile to our prod account (with assume role) and did:

AWS_PROFILE=prod-account pulumi import "aws:rds/cluster:Cluster" my-rds-cluster "rds-cluster-name"

and then it “successfully” found and imported the cluster. I put it in quotes because it basically imported it under a new provider (I think the default one), which then conflicted with what I had in code so it wanted to re-create it. I manually exported the stack JSON, edited the provider reference, re-imported it and it was happy. With that in mind, my questions: 1. Is it expected that I would need to do something like the

AWS_PROFILE=prod-account

above? Should it not select the provider I have defined in my stack (or ask me which one I want to use)? 2. Is it expected that it imported it into the stack state with a brand new provider that didn’t exist before?

I consider all this to be expected, which is why I don't use

pulumi import

(we also use only non-default providers). I always write the code manually and use the

importId

opt when importing a resource.

@little-cartoon-10569 tell me more about

importId

😄

It's the original way imports were managed: it allows you to import an existing resource during normal

pulumi up

. It's an opt, whose value documented at the bottom of every resource doc page, and which you add during your import run of

pulumi up

, then remove immediately afterwards (so Pulumi doesn't try to import it again).

OMG this would have saved me a lot of time. 🤦

@fresh-librarian-41835 @freezing-flag-53289 ^^