Language hosts

Language hosts, or language runtimes, are the means by which Pulumi is able to support a variety of programming languages. Officially, the term “language host” refers to the combination of two parts:

• A runtime, which is a Pulumi plugin that exposes the ability to execute programs written in a particular language according to a standardized gRPC interface. The plugin will be named pulumi-language-<language> (e.g. pulumi-language-nodejs for NodeJS, or pulumi-language-python for Python).

• An SDK, which is a set of libraries that provide the necessary abstractions and utilities for writing Pulumi programs in that language (e.g. @pulumi/pulumi in NodeJS, or pulumi in Python).

Often however, the term “language host” is used to refer to the runtime alone. Aside from providing the ability to 📞 Run programs, the runtime also supports a number of other operations:

• Code generation methods enable callers to generate both SDKs (📞 GeneratePackage) and programs (📞 GenerateProject) in the language.

• Query endpoints allow callers to calculate the set of language-specific dependencies (📞 GetProgramDependencies) or Pulumi plugins (📞 GetRequiredPlugins) that might be required by a program.

• The 📞 Pack method allows callers to package up bundles of code written in the language into a format suitable for consumption by other code (for instance, packaging an SDK for use as a dependency, or packaging a program for execution).