How to set Region and Account for a CDK Deployment
Borislav Hadzhiev
Fri Apr 23 2021·2 min read
Photo by Caleb Jones
Updated on Fri Apr 23 2021
Setting Region and Account for a CDK Deployment #
In order to set the account and region of a CDK deployment we have to
explicitly set the env property when instantiating the stack.
const app = new cdk.App(); new MyCdkStack(app, `my-cdk-stack`, { stackName: `my-cdk-stack`, // 👇 Explicitly set env property env: { region: 'us-east-1', account: 123456789, }, });
We can set the values of region and account using explicitly set by us
environment variables, secrets, parameters, etc.
An alternative approach would be to use environment variables that are already pre-set in the CDK environment:
const app = new cdk.App(); new MyCdkStack(app, `my-cdk-stack`, { stackName: `my-cdk-stack`, env: { region: process.env.CDK_DEFAULT_REGION, account: process.env.CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT, }, });
The CDK_DEFAULT_REGION and CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT environment variables get
resolved based on the --profile flag we pass when deploying.
If we don't explicitly pass a --profile flag then the values resolve to the
account and region, that correspond to our default AWS profile on that
machine.
CDK_DEFAULT_REGIONand CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT, because when collaborating with other developers on a project, we can't rely on every developer having the same settings for their default AWS profile. What ends up happening is the stack gets deployed to different regions/accounts by multiple people.Environment Agnostic CDK Stacks #
The default behavior when we don't specify account and region is that the
stack we deploy is environment agnostic.
This means, that CDK CLI checks whether we passed in the --profile flag when
deploying, if we did, it uses the account and region that correspond to that
profile:
npx cdk deploy --profile myprofile my-stack
If we don't pass the --profile flag, CDK takes the account and region
properties from the default profile on that machine:
npx cdk deploy my-stack
When we deploy an environment agnostic stack we're unable to access the resolved
values of the account and region properties, because they get
resolved at deployment time rather than synthesis time.
In order to explicitly set the account and region properties when deploying
a CDK application we have to set the env property when initializing the stack.
const app = new cdk.App(); new MyCdkStack(app, `cdk-stack`, { stackName: `cdk-stack`, // 👇 explicitly setting env env: { region: 'us-east-1', account: 123456789, }, });
Further Reading #
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