cdk synthesize clarification

❓ General Issue

The Question

According to the documentation the cdk synthesize command synthesizes and prints the CloudFormation template for the given stack. But in reality it prints the template of the given stack and outputs every stack’s template to cdk.out. I don’t know if this is a bug or the intended behavior. In the latter case why was it implemented this way? Why does it print to the console and output to the directory at the same time?

Environment

• CDK CLI Version: 1.39.0 (build 5d727c1)
• Module Version:
• OS: Windows 10
• Language: CLI

Other information

[shivlaks]

@suhaig thanks for letting us know about that. it seems like the documentation needs a bit of a refresh. copy @Jerry-AWS

cdk synth prints out the given stack. If you have multiple stacks, you should see a message that indicates the stacks that were synthsized.

const app = new cdk.App();
new ExampleStack(app, 'ExampleStack');
new ExampleStack(app, 'MyOtherExamplestack');

cdk synth would render to

Successfully synthesized to some/path/cdk.out
Supply a stack id (ExampleStack, MyOtherExamplestack) to display its template.

The printed output is intended to be human readable (which is why we render it in YAML). The cdk.out folder is the default directory in which the synthesized cloud assembly is stored. It’s used during deploy and stores the templates in JSON. We do not expect users to interact directly with the cloud assembly. Learn more about the cloud assembly schema here

@strottos you do not need to run synth ahead of a deploy, the CDK will handle that for you. If a cloud assembly directory does not exist (i.e. cdk.out), it will create one, synthesize the cloud assembly, and then deploy from that assembly.

[SomayaB]

Closing this issue since it seems to have been resolved by #8264. Feel free to reopen.