Stackctl
Manage CloudFormation Stacks through specifications.
About
stackctl
is a command-line tool for working with Stack Specifications. A Stack
Specification is a file-system format for describing deployed (or
to-be-deployed) CloudFormation Stacks including the Template, Parameters, and
Tags. stackctl
can be used to pretty-print, diff, and deploy these
specifications.
This project also contains a Haskell library for doing the same.
Install
Pre-requisites
- Have
~/.local/bin
on your $PATH
- Have
~/.local/share/man
on your $MANPATH
(for documentation)
- If on OSX,
brew install coreutils
(i.e. have ginstall
available)
- If on OSX,
brew install jq
Scripted
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/freckle/stackctl/main/install | bash
NOTE: some in the community have expressed concerns about the
security of so-called "curl-sh" installations. We think the argument has been
pretty well debunked, but feel free to use the manual steps
instead.
Manual
Go to the latest release and download the .tar.gz
asset appropriate
for your OS. Navigate to the directory containing the downloaded file and run:
tar xvf stackctl-*.tar.gz
cd stackctl
User installation:
make install PREFIX="$HOME/.local"
Global installation
sudo make install
Usage
Once installed, see:
stackctl --help
,
stackctl <command> --help
,
man 1 stackctl
, or
man 1 stackctl <command>
The man pages are also available online,
but contain documentation as of main
, and not your installed version.
Relationship to CloudGenesis
CloudGenesis is a project that also takes a directory of Stack
Specifications and deploys them when changed. Its on-disk format inspired ours
and, in fact, directories built for CloudGenesis can be managed by stackctl
(not necessarily the other way around).
The key differences are:
-
CloudGenesis supplies AWS CodeBuild tooling for handling changes to your
GitOps repository; Stackctl expects you to implement a GitHub Action that
installs and executes stackctl
commands as appropriate
This makes Stackctl better if you need or want to also run the same tooling in
a local context, but it makes CloudGenesis better if you need or want this
activity to remain within the boundaries of your AWS VPC.
-
CloudGenesis reacts to file-change events in S3, which only happens when you
synchronize from main
; Stackctl can run on any branch and easily be scoped
to files changed in the PR or push.
This enables Stackctl features like commenting with ChangeSet details on PRs,
which are not possible in CloudGenesis as it's currently implemented.
-
Stackctl adds the Depends
key, for ordering multi-Stack processing
CHANGELOG | LICENSE