cfctl - a Simple AWS CloudFormation Stack Lifecycle Management Tool

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cfctl is a command line tool which helps to facilitate and manage AWS CloudFormation stack lifecycle.

It supports a simple and highly flexible repository structure for organising Cloudformation templates, parameters and environments.

The reason for creating this tool you can read in medium

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Features

• No tool lock-in. You can switch back to using awscli without much hassle and vice versa.
• Supports parameter files in YAML format and provides many useful functions for parameter file templating.
• Provide file ecryption facility for secrets used in parameter templates and automatically decrypt them during deployment.
• Configuration over convention. Provide high flexibility to suit different needs in directory structures for manage templates, paramters and environment specific files.
• Auto stack order sorting during deployment based on dependancy.
• Auto detect circular dependency amongst deploying stacks.
• Automatically uploading nested stacks during deployment and return those stack urls for referencing.
• Dynamically retrieving stack outputs for stacks that referencing them.

API References

Please refer to the GoDoc

Getting Started

Installing

1. Download the desired version base on your OS from the releases page
2. Move it to the executables folder. For example for linux amd64: chmod +x cfctl-linux-amd64 && sudo mv cfctl-linux-amd64 /usr/local/bin/cfctl

Setup AWS Credentials

cfctl piggybacks your existing AWSCLI credential setting. If you don't have one, there are a few options:

• Use awscli environment variables

or

• Create two files: ~/.aws/credentials and ~/.aws/config as per instruction.

As a minimum, your IAM user must have permission to create S3 bucket. In addition, you will need permissions for AWS resources that your Cloudformation requires.

Enabling Shell Autocompletion

BASH

source <(cfctl completion bash) # setup autocomplete in bash into the current shell, bash-completion package should be installed first.
echo "source <(cfctl completion bash)" >> ~/.bashrc # add autocomplete permanently to your bash shell.

You can also use a shorthand alias for cfctl that also works with completion:

alias cf=cfctl
complete -F __start_cfctl cf

ZSH

source <(cfctl completion zsh)  # setup autocomplete in zsh into the current shell
echo "if [ $commands[cfctl] ]; then source <(cfctl completion zsh); fi" >> ~/.zshrc # add autocomplete permanently to your zsh shell

Quick Start

1. Create a sample repository by running below command. The Command will create a default repository structure (which you can change it to your liking).

$ cfctl init
$
$ tree cfctl-sample
cfctl-sample
├── deploy
│   └── sample
│       ├── environments
│       │   └── default
│       │       └── var.yaml
│       ├── parameters
│       │   └── s3.yaml
│       └── stacks.yaml
└── templates
    └── s3-encrypted.yaml

2. Deploy example stack which creates a new s3 bucket.

$ cd cfctl-sample/deploy/sample
$ cfctl stack deploy

3. Clean up

$ cfctl stack delete --all

Documentations

• Stack Configuration File
• Directory Structure
• Parameter file template
• Secrects Encryption
• Cheatsheet