pulumi/pulumi · error

unknown visibility: %q

Error message

unknown visibility: %q

What it means

Package visibility is an enum restricted to "public" or "private". The Visibility UnmarshalText method validates any incoming visibility string against those two values and throws this error otherwise. It exists to keep visibility metadata canonical so downstream access-control logic can rely on the parsed value.

Source

Thrown at sdk/go/common/apitype/package.go:210

		return "<empty>"
	}
	return v.status
}

func (v Visibility) MarshalJSON() ([]byte, error) {
	return json.Marshal(v.status)
}

func (v *Visibility) UnmarshalJSON(data []byte) error {
	var status string
	if err := json.Unmarshal(data, &status); err != nil {
		return err
	}
	switch status {
	case VisibilityPublic.status, VisibilityPrivate.status:
		*v = Visibility{status}
	default:
		return fmt.Errorf("unknown visibility: %q", status)
	}
	return nil
}

View on GitHub (pinned to 793f7b2e16)

Solutions

1. Change the visibility value to exactly "public" or "private"
2. Trim whitespace and match lowercase spelling
3. Upgrade the SDK if the publisher legitimately introduced a new visibility level

Example fix

// before
{"visibility": "internal"}

// after
{"visibility": "private"}

func validVisibility(s string) bool {
    return s == "public" || s == "private"
}

var v apitype.Visibility
if err := v.UnmarshalText([]byte(raw)); err != nil {
    return fmt.Errorf("bad visibility %q: %w", raw, err)
}

When it happens

Trigger: Unmarshaling package metadata JSON where the visibility field holds a string other than "public" or "private" (typo, different casing, or an invented value like "internal").

Common situations: Hand-editing package.json-style metadata; migrating from another registry format that uses different visibility vocabulary; publishing tooling emitting a new visibility level the SDK doesn't know.

Understand the failure class

Background: Invalid enum value errors: "Unknown type", "Invalid scope", "must be one of" — when a string is not on the library's allowed list — this error's family across 23 libraries.

Related errors

• unknown package status: %q
• minVersion must be >= 1, got %d
• maxVersion (%d) must be >= minVersion (%d)
• defaultVersion (%d) must be in [minVersion, maxVersion] = [%
• shell extra root %q is not a directory

AI-assisted analysis of pulumi/pulumi@793f7b2e16 (2026-08-31). Data as JSON: /api/errors/98ef821b3960660b. Report an issue: GitHub.