Use CDK to create new resources

[andrea-avogadro-archiva]

Hi, is it possible to create new resources using CDK instead of CloudFormation? I do not need to overried anything, just create new stuff. Thanks

[dannyrandall]

Hi @andrea-avogadro-archiva! There isn't a way to do that with Addons, but you can use CDK Overrides to only make new resources, without having to modify any of the Copilot-created resources! Any resources created in the override will be added to the main CloudFormation stack.

[andrea-avogadro-archiva]

Hi @dannyrandall thanks! Any canche to add this new resources in a dedicated nested stack? Thanks

[bvtujo]

@andrea-avogadro-archiva this gets a little complex, because nested stacks can only reference an s3 URL for their templates.

The way I see it, you could manage your addons with the cdk by creating a cdk app elsewhere, then synthesizing the template and redirecting the terminal output (the YAML stack which gets printed to stdout) to copilot/workload/addons/cdk.yml.

For example:

cdk synth -a './cdk-addon/my-app.js' \
  --version-reporting false \ 
  --path-metadata false \
  --asset-metadata false \
  1>./copilot/workload/addons/cdk.yml

You might have to manually add some CfnParameters to your CDK stack to mimic the required parameters in the addons template, and in order to avoid some CDK bootstrapping rules you'll have to customize your stack synthesizer (see this answer on StackOverflow). But this should let you workaround things nicely.

I'm sorry that Copilot doesn't already behave this way. Feel free to create an issue and let others +1 it; that will help prioritize this as a feature in a future release.