boondoggle

Boondoggle is a little tool meant to simplify deployment of Cloudformation stacks.

Usage

Given a CloudFormation template residing on S3 that takes two parameters HttpImage (an AMI ID) and DesiredHostCount (say, the desired count for an Autoscaling Group) deploy with:

$ boondoggle ensure my-stack --url s3://cf-bucket/my-stack.cf HttpImage:ami-123abc DesiredHostCount:6

If your cloudformation file is local, use --file instead of --url.

The ensure subcommand will create the stack if no such stack currently exists, or update it with the specified template on S3 and parameters if it already exists.

Or cancel an in-progress update to a stack:

$ boondoggle cancel-update my-stack

Or just look up the status of a stack:

$ boondoggle status my-stack

All these commands are blocking, so the operation will be allowed to complete before boondoggle exits.

Options:
  -p --profile=<profile>    Use the specified profile in your .boto
  -r --region=<region>      Use the specified region [default: us-east-1]
  -h --help                 Show this screen.
  -v --version              Show version.

Why not use the AWS CLI?

The AWS CLI provides methods to create and update Cloudformation stacks, but the CLI uses separate commands for creating and updating a stack, and the syntax for stack parameters is rather torturous.

Boondoggle also blocks until the stack update is complete, making it a better fit for CI and deployment.