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

Source code: Github

Setting up a CodeCatalyst Project, Repo, and Environment

Login to CodeCatalyst and go to your Space (Create one if you don't have)
Create a project from scratch
Create repository to store code and workflows of the project
Create CICD Environments which associates to AWS account for deploying our infrastructure
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

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

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

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  Triggers:
    - Branches:
        - main
      Type: PUSH

Actions

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

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    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

FrontendTest Test frontend code

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    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;

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

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    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

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

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    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

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  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

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  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

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  ➜  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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