Setting Up Your Project with Pulumi

Development, SaaS

As developers, we've all been there – staring at a blank page or an empty repository, trying to figure out where to start with setting up our project. But what if I told you that there's a way to streamline this process and have your entire setup ready in no time? Enter Pulumi, the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tool of choice for many developers.

In this guide, we'll take you through the steps of using Pulumi to set up your project from scratch. We'll cover two essential aspects: setting up our tools and system for a project, and configuring the underlying infrastructure that will power it.

Step 1: Creating Your GitHub Setup

When creating a new project, one of the first things we need is a team setup in GitHub. With Pulumi, this process becomes effortless:

  • Create a new project by specifying its name.
  • Assign members to your project and define their roles within it (e.g., developers, maintainers).
  • Set up a project board for tracking tasks.

Step 2: Configuring Basic DNS Settings

Next, we'll configure some basic settings for our domain using dnsimple. With Pulumi's API-based definition wrapped around dnsimple, you can easily set up test domain entries as default for your project. This ensures that your website and any services are accessible via a temporary domain while development is in progress.

Step 3: Setting Up Your IaC Repository

Now it's time to create the basic infrastructure repository for our new project using Pulumi. We'll:

  • Inject common GitHub secrets used across all projects (e.g., access tokens for private npm repositories).
  • Configure code repository settings, such as managing access for assigned members and protected branches.

Step 4: Automating Your Project Code Repositories

In a microservice setup with multiple services, we can easily spin up new services by adding their names to the list. Pulumi will automatically set them up according to our default configurations:

  • Manage access for assigned members.
  • Set protected branches and add necessary secrets (e.g., semantic versioning tokens).

Benefits of Using Pulumi

With this streamlined setup process using Pulumi, you can quickly spin up new projects and kick off their basic configuration. In microservice projects, adding a new service becomes as simple as updating the list – run pulumi, and start coding within the project.

For Node.js enthusiasts, having an existing template microservice speeds up your setup even further since it includes prepared defaults for dockerization, application configuration, and helm templating. Setting up a new service in test with all essential aspects covered (open API doc to default logging) is achievable in just 15 minutes!

Ready to get started? With Pulumi's IaC capabilities, you can say goodbye to tedious setup processes and hello to faster project kickoff times!