Hi, I have two questions, and would appreciate any help I can get! 🙂 1. I was wondering if there's a way to read config and enable falsy values instead of None, given that when you read a list the flasy value would be

[]

or with a dict

{}

. Or if there's a smart way to convert pulumi config to a dictionary, without iterating over the keys and decyphering the bag name, because we have infinite number of lines that look like:

name = config.require('name')
vpc_id = config.require('vpc_id')
tags = config.require('tags')

(obviously this can be done with dict comprehension but not what I'm looking for):

values = ['name', 'vpc_id', 'tags']
my_dict = { value: config.require(value) for value in values }

I'm looking for a more generic approach, what happens if a new parameter is introduced? 2. I'm looking to create layers of configuration in which I can explicitly say that a specific config should be appended or overriden. e.g: tags should be appended, configuration layer 1: physical site configuration layer 2: environment configuration layer 3: micro service

Not sure if that’s gonna help you but I personally rely heavily on structured configuration (https://www.pulumi.com/docs/intro/concepts/config/#structured-configuration) and load the whole nested object into pydantic model for further validation (thanks to that I can easily check if required fields are present and even check the type correctness). Could you describe a little bit more what you wanted to achieve?

Thank you for the quick response! 🙂 Regarding the structured configuration, exactly what I mean but I need this to be a bit more comprehensive. Let's take the example there for instance, what happens if the user hasn't defined

nums

? When you perform this line:

config = pulumi.Config()
data = config.require_object("data")
print("Nums:", data.get("nums"))

data.get("nums")

returns

None

, obviously I can use

data.get("nums", [])

to specify this manually, but that means I am aware that nums is a list, and therefore I know the falsy default value is

[]

. But what happens when the type is not known? Or we decide to change nums into a dict?

what happens when the type is not known

I’d joke that you’re already f**ed 😄 . Even in python (that is a language without static typing) you should at least have some assumptions regarding data types in order to work on them. If

nums

was a list and you decided to change to into a dict, you’re most probably break your code. Check my suggestion regarding pydantic models usage:

from typing import Dict, List, Mapping, Optional
from pydantic import BaseModel

class MyConfig(BaseModel):
    nums_with_default_empty: List[int] = []
    optional_nums: Optional[List[int]]
    required_nums: List[int]

...

pulumi_conf = pulumi.Config().get_object("config") or {}
config = MyConfig.parse_obj(pulumi_conf)

Pydantic sounds exactly what I'm looking for. I do have my configuration separated to MyClass and MyClassArgs, so I might as well do it like that. I'll play around a little and get back to you, but so far it seems as though this has been extremely helpful.