Would it be useful to access SceptreContext and stack_name in stack config?

[ngfgrant]

Hi all,

I am playing about with various things and looking to make some more information available in stack config. One thing which would be pretty easy to make available would be the SceptreContext (https://github.com/cloudreach/sceptre/blob/master/sceptre/context.py).

It is then accessible like:

...
stack_tags:
  context_item: {{context.project_path}}

I've also been able to easily add stack_name to the stack_config

accessible like:

...
stack_tags:
  name: {{stack_name}}

Would this be useful?

[ngfgrant]

Here is the poc 160ca0e

[mike-rsi]

I do actually like to add the project path as a stack tag. If you have a lot of different Sceptre projects that have created a lot of different resources in your AWS account, it makes it easy to work backwards to figure out which Sceptre project on your machine is responsible for a specific resource in your account. So example 1 would be helpful.

Example 2 specifically, not as much, since a aws:cloudformation:stack-name tag is already added automatically by the CFN service to resources created by a stack. I'm not sure if access to {{ stack_name }} would be helpful in other scenarios however.

[zaro0508]

Yes, very useful. I think the use case for this is in issue #624
Other related issues are #349 and #355

[zaro0508]

@ngfgrant would it be possible for you to make your POC into a PR?

[ngfgrant]

Yep I will flesh something out in the next week or so..

[kangastus]

stack_name sounds great! Would it be possible to have also the whole path of the Stack Config file?

In Sceptre 1.x I was using stack_group_path (if I recall correctly) to access Application name, AWS Account name, Region and Component name (from Stack Config file name) that all were stored in the project structure. For example:

<Application name>
- <AWS Account>
  - <Region>
    - <Component Name>.yaml

Then I was able to launch the whole stack to all AWS accounts and regions by simply running the magical sceptre launch <Application Name>.

In Sceptre 2.x however the related command_path is only usable if I do sceptre launch <Application-name>/<AWS Account>/<Region>/<Component Name>.yaml which requires looping each stack individually and causing deployment slow down.

I'm currently accessing the information in the path by using for example name_prefix: {{ command_path.3 }}-{{ command_path.2 }}-{{ command_path.1 }} in top level Stack Group Config and then in Stack Config using {{ stack_group_config.custom.name_prefix }}

Now I could store the same information in config.yaml files but that feels wrong and could cause more duplication within the nested Stack Group Config files.

[kangastus]

Using the approach discussed in #638 I was able to get directory names using the following syntax:

• Application name: {% set p = stack_group_path.split('/') %}{{ p[0] }}
• AWS Account: {% set p = stack_group_path.split('/') %}{{ p[1] }}
• Region: {% set p = stack_group_path.split('/') %}{{ p[2] }}

This could be cleaner though like being able to use stack_group_path.1. The top level Stack Group Config looks like a mess now.

I can now use for example sceptre launch ApplicationName and it all works except for the ComponentName. That would be stored in the name of the Stack Config YAML file.

I did not find a way to get ComponentName using the Stack Config filename. I moved the Stack Config to a directory named after Component name. However for some reason using the split I can only get three first elements so I had to resort to the following uggly not scalable syntax to get the 4th item:

{% set o = stack_group_path.split(stack_group_path.split('/')[2])[1][1:] %}{{ o }}

So in regards of this ticket it would be fun to have stack_group_path available with all parts of the path (not just 0..2).

(Sceptre, version 2.2.1)