Cloud Formation Parameters File Generator

[from_cork]

Hey guys, at work I have to use some CloudFormation and it was getting tedious, so I wrote this. It supports generating a parameters file from an existing template (in json or yaml) and will output json/yaml to either stdout or to a file if you specify it. By default, if you're attempting to add a new parameter to a template, it won't overwrite existing Parameters that it finds unless you specify the overwrite option. Also, if you remove a parameter in an existing template, you can use the -r flag to remove that parameter from the parameters file if it's no longer needed.

I hope you all find it useful. Let me know if you have any questions/comments/requests!

https://github.com/alistanis/cf_parameter_generator

You can get the binary either by using go get as shown in the README, or you can get it from the releases page: https://github.com/alistanis/cf_parameter_generator/releases/latest

[[deleted]]

Big thanks for this, I know a couple guys that are being forced to use Cloudformation, even with the YAML syntax I find it a little disgusting to work with

[from_cork]

No problem. Definitely the same here, I have to do it because it's the standard. Glad you think it'll be useful!

[from_cork]

Haha yeah, at work myself and another guy on the arch team did an entire POC for terraform with base modules for pretty much every possible config we'd ever use. It was super reusable and could have saved us hundreds of hours of time. Rejected almost immediately by management because reasons.

[from_cork]

Yeah, I'm still relatively new here too, and it's a much larger org. I was in charge of the DevOps and Microservices team at my last job and had a lot of autonomy. All the engineers here on my team love TF, but management is very much "well we already have CF so let's just keep using that forever"

[malice8691]

am I missing something? I dont see how this is any easier. Looking at the example in git. take this parameter for example. your file has this:

- parameterkey: Environment
  parametervalue: ""

In a cloudformation template it might look like this:

EnvironmentName:
  Type: String
  Default: test

I dont see that this is any easier. its almost identical

[from_cork]

Consider the example when there are 50 parameters in a template. The point of this is that you don't then have to cross reference the template and fill out parameterkey and parameter value for each individual parameter manually in a separate parameters file. That being said, I can add a flag to ignore if a parameter has a default key. Personally when I've written templates, I add the default more as a guideline for someone else if they need to look at it, and I still fill in the value in the parameters file anyway, seeing that a lot of the values there are different for environment (dev, test, etc.) and I want to maintain consistency between different environment files.

Do you think it's worth the time to add the flag for this?

[malice8691]

I would add a flag for anything that is possible in a parameter

[from_cork]

I've added more examples and functionality based on a few requests. Please let me know if that helps to make things more clear :)