Resolution error: No construct named was found, the ${construct:..} variable is invalid. unit serverless v4

[piolet]

Description

I am currently migrating a multi-service project from Serverless Framework v3 to Serverless Framework v4.

Before the migration, with Serverless v3, the same project and same Lift constructs were working correctly.
After upgrading to Serverless v4 and deploying through Serverless Compose, some services now fail during variable resolution with errors saying that local Lift constructs cannot be found, even though they are clearly declared in the same serverless.yml.

Questions

Has anyone already encountered this issue when migrating from Serverless v3 to v4, especially when using Lift + Compose?

At this stage, it looks like `${construct:...} resolution may behave differently under Serverless v4 / Compose compared to v3, even when the construct is locally declared in the same service.

How to Reproduce

I have a monorepo using serverless compose with multiple services.

Two examples:

1. backend service

In apis/back/serverless.yml I have:

provider:
  environment:
    DYNAMODB_CACHE_TABLE: ${construct:cacheTable.tableName}

constructs:
  cacheTable:
    type: database/dynamodb-single-table
    ...

1. s3-manager service

In apis/s3-manager/serverless.yml I have:

resources:
  Resources:
    S3ApiDomain:
      Type: AWS::Route53::RecordSet
      Properties:
        Name: ${construct:s3-api.cname}
        ...

constructs:
  s3-api:
    type: server-side-website
    ...

resources:
  Resources:
    S3DomainIpV4:
      Type: AWS::Route53::RecordSet
      Properties:
        ...
        Name: s3.${self:custom.domain}
        Type: A
        AliasTarget:
          ...
          DNSName: ${construct:s3-api.cname}

Both constructs are declared in the same service file where they are referenced.

Actual behavior

During serverless deploy with Compose on Serverless v4, I get errors like:

✖ s3-manager
  Resolution error: No construct named 's3-api' was found, the ${construct:s3-api.cname} variable is invalid.

✖ backend
  Resolution error: No construct named 'cacheTable' was found, the ${construct:cacheTable.tableName} variable is invalid.

Expected behavior

Since the constructs are declared in the same serverless.yml, I would expect ${construct:...} references to resolve correctly, as they did previously with Serverless v3.

Additional Information

This setup was working before on Serverless Framework v3
The issue appeared while migrating to Serverless Framework v4
The project is deployed via Serverless Compose
The problem affects at least:
${construct:cacheTable.tableName}
${construct:s3-api.cname}

Other services in the same compose deployment can still deploy successfully
Initially I also had a separate issue with a local plugin path (./vendor/bref/bref), but that has been fixed and is unrelated to this construct-resolution problem

Versions

Serverless Framework: 4.33.0
serverless-lift: 1.34.3
Node.js: 22

[piolet]

Sorry @mnapoli to tag you on this, but do you have any idea why this problem is happening?

I tried to fix my lift using GPT or Claude, but both clearly failed, indicating that Serverless Compose’s asynchronous handling seems to be causing an issue.

This little “detail” is preventing me from migrating to Serverless 4.

I’d like to help resolve this issue, but if you have any leads, I’d love to hear them.