Stack management

These pages cover the day-to-day operations of running Pulumi stacks: scoping updates to specific resources, previewing changes before they apply, safely editing state when recovery is needed, and configuring a self-managed state backend.

Pages

Targeted updates - Limit which resources Pulumi operates on with --target, --exclude, and --target-replace. Learn the trade-offs of partial operations and when to use them.

Running your program on refresh and destroy - Use --run-program to execute your Pulumi program before refresh or destroy. Required for dynamic credentials and useful for diff-clean provider upgrades.

Update plans - Preview and review infrastructure changes before applying them. Update plans help you catch unintended modifications and coordinate changes across teams.

Detecting and reconciling drift - Detect when your cloud resources diverge from your Pulumi program, then choose to remediate (re-apply code) or adopt (accept reality into the program).

Editing state files - Safe techniques for modifying Pulumi state when normal operations can’t recover. Use sparingly and always back up state first.

Restoring deleted stacks - Recover a recently deleted stack from the Pulumi Cloud console, including after an accidental pulumi stack rm --force.

Using a DIY backend - Configure a self-managed state backend with AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage, Google Cloud Storage, PostgreSQL, or the local filesystem.

Refactoring with aliases - Use the aliases resource option to rename, re-parent, change the type, or move resources across stacks without destroying and recreating them.