stacker is a tool and library used to create & update multiple CloudFormation stacks. It was originally written at Remind and released to the open source community.
stacker StackTemplates are written in troposphere, though the purpose of most templates is to keep them as generic as possible and then use configuration (and CloudFormation Parameters/Outputs) to modify them.
At this point this is very much alpha software - it is still in heavy development, and interfaces/configuration/etc may/will likely/most definitely change :)
That said, at Remind we use stacker to manage all of our Cloudformation stacks- both in development, staging and production without any major issues.
The stacker command is built to have sub-commands, much like git. Currently the
only implemented command is build, which handles taking your stack config
and then launching or updating stacks as necessary.
We've provided an example stack in conf/example.yaml that can be launched in your account. It creates 4 stacks:
- A VPC (including NAT hosts in each AZ, and dns entries in BaseDomain)
- A public, route53 zone (BaseDomain parameter)
- A bastion stack (for ssh'ing into other stacks on the VPC)
- A RDS stack (postgres)
- An autoscaling group stack
The size of most of these is m3.medium, but you can change that in the config if you'd like to play with something smaller. To launch the stacks, after installing stacker and loading your AWS API keys in your environment (AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID & AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY), call the following:
stacker build -v -p BaseDomain=blahblah.com -r us-east-1 example.com conf/example.yaml
As of now there is no option to tear down the stack in the tool (we plan to add it), so you'll need to tear the stacks it creates down manually. When doing so, it's important that you tear down all the stacks BUT the VPC stack first, since they all depend on the VPC stack. Once they are torn down, you can safely tear down the VPC stack. If you try deleting them all (including VPC) in one swoop, you'll see that VPC stack gets hung up while waiting for the others to tear down.
There are multiple ways to define parameters for stacks, each useful in different ways:
- the
-p/--parametercommand line argument - in the stack config
- from an existing stack
Each of those overrides similarly named parameters beneath it, so if you
use -p CidrBlock= on the command line, it doesn't matter what is in the
config file or any existing stacks. This is useful if, for example, you want
to keep sensitive information (passwords, etc) out of the config file (which
you'll likely check into a RCS), but need a way to supply them.
When updating an existing stack, if you don't supply a parameter in either the config or CLI, it will fall back on checking the existing stack for the parameter. If it finds it, it will use that automatically.
As well as definining the stack config, you can further customize the stack
config via an environment (ie the -e or --environment argument).
The environment should point at a yaml formatted file that contains a flat dictionary (ie: only key: value pairs). Those keys can be used in the stack config as python string.Template mappings.
For example, if you wanted to name a stack based on the environment you were building it in, first you would create an environment file with the environment name in it (staging in this case):
environment: stage
Then, in the stack definition for the stack you are modifying (say the vpc stack), you would have the following:
- name: ${environment}VPC
Stacker would then name the VPC stack stageVPC.