We’ve been using Codepipeline for several months now, and with it starting to look like a longer term solution for us some of the AWS Console limitations are becoming prohibitive. For example you can’t move an action around in a stage in the console. Your only option it to delete and recreate the action where you wanted it to be.

Fortunately, most of these struggles are solved by creating your Pipelines in Cloudformation!

The AWS Cloudformation Template reference will get you started with the basics, but it leaves a lot of question marks around the different Action provider types and how to format stages and actions.

For example, we have an Action that deploys a Cloudformation stack. I had the action definition below:

            -
              Name: Deploy-Stack
              InputArtifacts:
                - 
                  Name: our-cft
              ActionTypeId:
                Category: Deploy
                Owner: AWS
                Version: 1
                Provider: Cloudformation
              Configuration:
                ActionMode: CREATE_UPDATE
                StackName: Our-Staging-Stack
                TemplatePath: our-cft::our-template-name.yml
                TemplateConfiguration: our-cft::stackConfig.json
                Capabilities: CAPABILITY_NAMED_IAM
                RoleArn: arn:aws:iam::/RoleName
                RunOrder: 2

And I was getting a very vague error about the Cloudformation provider not being available. I opened a case with AWS Support only to find out that it was a casing issue, and the Provider needed to be “CloudFormation”.

Which was helpful, but still left me with a lot of questions like, “What casing to I need to use for Codebuild? Codedeploy? What are the Configuration items for Invoking Lambda functions?”

After spending some time searching the internet, and finding painfully few examples, I turned to my trusty friend the AWS Powershell Tools. My guess is that we can figure out what values to put into our Cloudformation template by digging out what an existing pipeline has for configuration.

It turns out the Powershell tools have a number of commandlets for interacting with Codepipeline. The one we’ll use today is Get-CPPipeline.

To find out more I ran

get-help get-cppipeline

Which shows the information below for the syntax of the command

So let’s give it a shot!

I can already guess the stages property is what I’ll be interested in next, so let’s pull one out to see what it looks like.

I know that this stage has a Cloudformation stack that it deploys, so let’s see if I can figure out what the configuration looks like from there. After some digging, I found the ActionTypeId attribute

And there it is! CloudFormation with all the correct capitalization. My guess is confirmed and this seems like a valid plan. I threw together this powershell function to print out information about an existing pipeline. Obviously you’ll need to use “Set-AWSCredentials” to pick a profile or IAM account that has access.

function print-pipeline($pipeline) {
    write-host "Pipeline name: $($pipeline.Name)"
    foreach ($stage in $pipeline.stages) {
        write-host "Stage: $($stage.Name)"
        foreach($action in $stage.Actions) {
            Write-host "Action: $($Action.Name)"
            write-host "Action Type ID: $($action.ActionTypeId.Category) - $($action.ActionTypeId.Provider)"
            write-host "Configurations: "
            write-host $action.Configuration
            write-host ""
        }
        Write-host ""
    }

}

set-awscredentials -profilename 
set-defaultawsregion us-east-1

$pipeline = get-cppipeline -name 

print-pipeline $pipeline

A couple notes, the Configuration attribute looks like it’s printing out as a list, but I wasn’t able to iterate over it. My guess is this is still early enough on in AWS supporting interactions with Codepipeline that some of the functions needed aren’t supported.

Lastly, here a some snippets of Action Types we use, pulled out of a couple of our templates.

Below is an AWS Powershell Tools snippet that will pull down a cloudwatch log stream and dump it both to your console and to a file. There are a few parameters you’ll need to set

1. LogStreamName – this should be the specific log stream you want to download. Usually this correlates to a Codebuild run
2. LogGroupName – this will be the /aws/codebuild/
3. OutFile location – this is where you want the files dumped