Systems

Internal building blocks of the Pulumi platform — code that lives inside the CLI/engine binary but doesn't map cleanly to a single user-facing app or package. Each is a distinct architectural concern.

Sub-pages

System	Source	One-liner
Deployment engine	pkg/engine/, pkg/resource/deploy/	Plans and executes operations
Backends	pkg/backend/	Where snapshots live
Resource graph & step model	pkg/resource/deploy/	The state machine of every resource
Codegen	pkg/codegen/	SDKs, programs, and conversion
Plugin system	pkg/engine/plugins.go, pkg/cmd/pulumi/plugin/	Discovery, install, and lifecycle of every sub-process
Secrets	pkg/secrets/	Encrypting confidential values in snapshots

Active contributors

Active contributors: Ian Wahbe, Thomas Gummerer, Julien, Fraser Ashyggton, Justin Van Patten, Tom Harding, Fraser Waters

Why this carve-up

The systems lens groups code that is reused across many CLI commands. The engine is invoked by up, preview, refresh, destroy, import. The plugin system is used by every operation that needs a language host or provider. The codegen system is used by pulumi convert, pulumi package gen-sdk, and at SDK-build time. By documenting these as systems rather than commands, we avoid duplicating the same content under multiple CLI subcommands.

See also

• Architecture overview
• Apps: CLI for how user-facing commands enter these systems.
• Primitives: resources and URNs.