Bootstrapping AWS CDK Automation With Amazon CodeCatalyst

Abstract

• A step-by-step guide on establishing an AWS CDK setup alongside Amazon CodeCatalyst from the ground up, enabling the creation of a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline for your infrastructure.
• AWS CDK is fantastic for overseeing your entire infrastructure as code, but when multiple developers are involved in modifying the infrastructure, the situation can become chaotic without a proper mechanism like a CI/CD pipeline. Absence of such a system makes coordinating and communicating changes to the infrastructure a challenging task, and this challenge amplifies as more individuals participate in the modification process.
• This tutorial will guide you through setting up a CI/CD pipeline using Amazon CodeCatalyst and AWS CDK for building To-Do web application

Table Of Contents

• Setting up a CodeCatalyst Project, Repo, and Environment
• Design workflows
• Source code and CDK stacks
• Push source code to repo
• Workflows Runs
• Conclusion

🚀 Setting up a CodeCatalyst Project, Repo, and Environment

1. Login to CodeCatalyst and go to your Space (Create one if you don't have)
2. Create a project from scratch

1. Create repository to store code and workflows of the project

1. Create CICD Environments which associates to AWS account for deploying our infrastructure.

1. Create IAM role for codecatalyst to consume during running workflows. It should be already created while you create the Space or you can customize the others

🚀 Design workflows

• Workflows directory

  .codecatalyst
  └── workflows
      └── main_fullstack_workflow.yaml

• Workflows is triggered by PUSH of branch main and includes following Actions

  Triggers:
    - Branches:
        - main
      Type: PUSH

1. FrontendBuildAndPackage build react app, target build which is shared to cross-actions by Artifacts of Outputs
   

   FrontendBuildAndPackage:
     Identifier: aws/build@v1
     Inputs:
       Sources:
         - WorkflowSource
     Outputs:
       Artifacts:
         - Name: frontend
           Files:
             - "**/*"
     Configuration:
       Steps:
         - Run: cd static-assets/frontend
         - Run: npm install
         - Run: echo "REACT_APP_SERVICE_URL=/api/todos" > ".env"
         - Run: npm run build
   

2. FrontendTest Test frontend code
   

   FrontendTest:
       Identifier: aws/managed-test@v1
       Inputs:
         Sources:
           - WorkflowSource
       Outputs:
         AutoDiscoverReports:
           IncludePaths:
             - frontend/**/*.xml
           ExcludePaths:
             - frontend/node_modules/**/*
           ReportNamePrefix: AutoDiscovered
           Enabled: true
           SuccessCriteria:
             PassRate: 100
       Configuration:
         Steps:
           - Run: cd static-assets/frontend
           - Run: npm install
           - Run: npm test -- --coverage --watchAll=false;
   

3. CDKBootstrapAction Run cdk bootstrap for the region of the account with latest CDK version. This action depends on FrontendTest and FrontendBuildAndPackage
   

   CDKBootstrapAction:
     Identifier: aws/cdk-bootstrap@v1
     Configuration:
       Region: us-east-1
       CdkCliVersion: latest
     Environment:
       Name: default_environment
       Connections:
         - Name: "123456789012"
           Role: CodeCatalystWorkflowDevelopmentRole-simflexcloud
     DependsOn:
       - FrontendTest
       - FrontendBuildAndPackage
   

4. CDKDeploy Download build target of FrontendBuildAndPackage and trigger cdk deploy, this action depends on CDKBootstrapAction. Here I don't use the defined action aws/cdk-deploy@v1 of CodeCatalyst because I'd like to use projen and pnmp in CDK and handle copying frontend target build
   

   CDKDeploy:
     Identifier: aws/build@v1
     Inputs:
       Artifacts:
         - frontend
     Outputs:
       AutoDiscoverReports:
         IncludePaths:
           - "**/*"
         ExcludePaths:
           - "*/.codecatalyst/workflows/*"
         ReportNamePrefix: AutoDiscovered
         Enabled: true
     Configuration:
       Steps:
         - Run: cp -r static-assets/frontend/build static-assets/cdkStack/src/lib/frontend/
         - Run: cd static-assets/cdkStack
         - Run: npm install -g pnpm
         - Run: pnpm i --no-frozen-lockfile
         - Run: export CDK_DEPLOY_ACCOUNT=123456789012
         - Run: export CDK_DEPLOY_REGION=us-east-1
         - Run: pnpm dlx projen deploy --all --require-approval never
     Environment:
       Name: default_environment
       Connections:
         - Name: "123456789012"
           Role: CodeCatalystWorkflowDevelopmentRole-simflexcloud
     DependsOn:
       - FrontendTest
       - FrontendBuildAndPackage
   

• Use EC2 compute type for CodeCatalyst workflows

  Compute:
    Type: EC2
    Fleet: Linux.x86-64.Large

🚀 Source code and CDK stacks

• Structure
  • cdkStack Define CDK stacks and use projen for configuration management as well as pnpm
  • frontend Frontend react app

  static-assets
  ├── cdkStack
  │   │   ├── LICENSE
  │   │   ├── README.md
  │   │   ├── cdk.json
  │   │   ├── package.json
  │   │   ├── src
  │   │   │   ├── bin
  │   │   │   │   └── main.ts
  │   │   │   ├── lib
  │   │   │   │   ├── backend
  │   │   │   │   │   ├── lambda
  │   │   │   │   │   │   ├── CorsAPIGatewayProxyResult.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   │   ├── Todo.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   │   ├── addTodo.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   │   ├── deleteTodo.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   │   ├── getTodo.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   │   ├── getTodos.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   │   └── updateTodo.ts
  │   │   │   │   │   └── todo-api-stack.ts
  │   │   │   │   └── frontend
  │   │   │   │       ├── build
  │   │   │   │       ├── constants.ts
  │   │   │   │       └── frontend-stack.ts
  │   │   │   └── main.ts
  │   │   ├── test
  │   │   │   └── todo-api.test.ts
  │   │   ├── tsconfig.dev.json
  │   │   └── tsconfig.json
  │   └── frontend
  │       ├── README.md
  │       ├── babel.config.js
  │       ├── jest.config.js
  │       ├── package.json
  │       ├── public
  │       │   ├── index.html
  │       │   ├── manifest.json
  │       │   └── robots.txt
  │       ├── src
  │       │   ├── App.css
  │       │   ├── App.test.tsx
  │       │   ├── App.tsx
  │       │   ├── index.css
  │       │   ├── index.tsx
  │       │   ├── react-app-env.d.ts
  │       │   ├── reportWebVitals.ts
  │       │   ├── setupTests.ts
  │       │   ├── to-do.api.ts
  │       │   └── to-do.types.ts
  │       └── tsconfig.json
  ├── tsconfig.dev.json
  ├── tsconfig.json
  └── yarn.lock

🚀 Push source code to repo

• Init the repo and add repo URL which is created from the above as origin

  ➜  git init
  Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/vudao/workspace/codecatalyst/cdk-todo-web-app/.git/
  ➜  git remote add origin https://vumdao@git.us-west-2.codecatalyst.aws/v1/simflexcloud/cdk-todo-web-app/cdk-todo-web-app
  ➜  git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/main main
  branch 'main' set up to track 'origin/main' by rebasing.
  ➜  git pull
  ➜  git add .
  ➜  git commit -m "Init commit"
  ➜  git push origin main

🚀 Workflows Runs

• When the commit is pushed to the main branch, CodeCatalyst CI/CD triggers the workflows

• The CDKDeploy triggers cloudformation to create AWS resources

• After the workflows done, we now have the To-Do Web app UI

🚀 Conclusion

Congratulations! You've successfully bootstrapped and initialized AWS CDK with CodeCatalyst, and you can now deploy infrastructure changes or update frontend/backend using a pull request workflow.

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