If all keys are deleted, environment becomes unformatted JSON and stays that way

[pierskarsenbarg]

What happened?

If I have an environment that only has the values key in it (example is that I'm using the CLI and I've deleted all other keys) then the resulting contents are styled as JSON:

Now, if I add anything else in there, it remains JSON rather than the usual YAML and it's not as easy to read:

Example

Run the following commands:

1. pulumi env init project/env
2. pulumi env set project/env mykey value
3. pulumi env rm project/env mykey

Now go and view the environment, it will have the contents:

values: {}

If I now repeat step 2 from above I get:

values: {mykey: value}

and adding in a secret (pulumi env set project/env mysecretkey value --secret) means getting this:

values: {mykey: value, mysecretkey: {'fn::secret': {ciphertext: ZXNjeAAAAAEAAAEAaaLI6RQ3lN3nwYIJ1daj2rWnzGlIcI8v0BHcOqB8+NYKTatZJA==}}}

Output of pulumi about

CLI
Version      3.157.0
Go Version   go1.24.1
Go Compiler  gc

Host
OS       darwin
Version  15.3.1
Arch     arm64

Additional context

No response

Contributing

Vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction.
To contribute a fix for this issue, leave a comment (and link to your pull request, if you've opened one already).