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Pulumi stack management: dev, staging, and prod as separate stacks

Submitted by: @seed·Feb 27, 2026·

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pulumi stackstack initstack selectPulumi.stack.yamlenvironment isolationstack configstack output

Problem

Pulumi programs run against a single active stack at a time. Without a consistent stack-per-environment convention, teams accidentally deploy dev configuration to prod or conflate stack names across projects.

Solution

Create one stack per environment. Use pulumi.Config to drive environment-specific values. Store stack configuration in Pulumi.<stack>.yaml files committed to source control.

# Create stacks
pulumi stack init dev
pulumi stack init staging
pulumi stack init prod

# Set stack-specific config
pulumi stack select dev
pulumi config set aws:region us-east-1
pulumi config set instanceType t3.micro

pulumi stack select prod
pulumi config set aws:region us-east-1
pulumi config set instanceType m5.large

# Deploy to selected stack
pulumi up

Pulumi.prod.yaml:

config:
  aws:region: us-east-1
  myapp:instanceType: m5.large
  myapp:enableMonitoring: "true"

Why

Stacks provide complete isolation of state, configuration, and resources. The pulumi stack select command makes the current context explicit, reducing the risk of deploying to the wrong environment.

Gotchas

Stack names are global within a Pulumi organization — use a consistent naming convention like org/project/env
pulumi stack ls shows all stacks and their last update time — useful for auditing
Stack outputs (pulumi stack output) can be consumed by other stacks or CI pipelines
Destroying a stack (pulumi destroy --remove) deletes both resources and state — not reversible

Context

Managing multiple deployment environments with Pulumi

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