Description
Describe the feature
Currently, the cdk deploy --outputs-file outputs.json option enables writing the generated outputs to a file, in the format:
{ STACK_NAME: { KEY: VALUE } }
The information related to the description of the stack outputs items is lost.
It would be useful to keep this information, for example to auto-generate an UI starting from the outputs.
To do this, I suggest to extend the interface with another option, for example cdk deploy --outputs-file outputs.json --outputs-file-with-descriptions, generating the format:
{ STACK_NAME: [ {"key": KEY, "value": VALUE, "description": DESCRIPTION} ] }
In other words, each stack should contain a list of dictionaries with the key/value/description fields.
Currently it is not possible to get the description information, if not looking up in the cloudformation.
Use Case
The description field would be useful to convey the information of each output items in a human readable format.
For example you might use it to auto-generate a UI (either textual or graphical).
Currently it is possible to achieve this by querying cloudformation, but this implies more operations while this information should be already available when the outputs file is generated in the first place.
Proposed Solution
I suggest to extend the cdk deploy CLI with some new option.
It might either be:
cdk deploy --outputs-file outputs.json --outputs-file-with-descriptions
or:
cdk deploy --outputs-file outputs.json --outputs-file-mode include-descriptions
probably the latter being more extensible.
Other Information
No response
Acknowledgements
- I may be able to implement this feature request
- This feature might incur a breaking change
CDK version used
2.178
Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)
not relevant since it is OS independent