(cli): A way to get profile name in stack when it's specified in the command-line option

I use AWS SDK in my CDK stack to fetch information that is not managed by CDK. When I set the profile name by using ‘–profile’ option, it only affects to stack itself but not the inner AWS SDK. It means that CDK stack will deploy on Account A but AWS SDK fetch the information from Account B.

Of course, when I set the profile manually in the source code like this, it works. But it’s not flexible especially when I want to switch deploy stages.

AWS.config.credentials = new AWS.SharedIniFileCredentials({ profile: 'MyProfileNameForAccountA' });

Is there any way to get the profile name specified in the command line option? If not, I would like to ask you to add the way to get the profile name in the stack like this.

const profileName = // A way to get profile name that is specified in the command-line option.
AWS.config.credentials = new AWS.SharedIniFileCredentials({ profile: profileName });

Use Case

This feature is useful for those who want or need to use AWS SDK in the stacks even if it is not a recommended way to manage resources.

Proposed Solution

A way to get profile name when it is specified in the command-line option. I saw the profile name in the result of cdk deploy --verbose as command-line arguments, so I hope the information is passed to the stack. (But cannot get it directly for now.)

• 👋 I may be able to implement this feature request
• ⚠️ This feature might incur a breaking change

---

This is a 🚀 Feature Request

[rayrapetyan]

Why this issue is closed? It’s still actual, generic and is unrelated to “using SDK from CDK anti-pattern”.

[adam-nielsen]

I worked around this by changing the way I specified the profile. Instead of npx cdk --profile my-aws-profile deploy I specified it in the standard AWS_PROFILE environment variable:

AWS_PROFILE=my-aws-profile npx cdk deploy

This worked just the same as using --profile, but with the added advantage that the AWS SDK also picked up the profile automatically so I could do the lookups I needed that CDK doesn’t support.