Failed cdk deploy/delete actions should try to tell me why

Deleting a “demo” stack that contains a bucket with removalPolicy: cdk.RemovalPolicy.Destroy

$ cdk destroy DemoBucketStack
...
 ❌  DemoBucketStack: destroy failed Error: The stack named DemoBucketStack is in a failed state: DELETE_FAILED (The following resource(s) failed to delete: [Bucket83908E77]. )
    at waitFor (/Users/mp/.nvm/versions/node/v10.13.0/lib/node_modules/aws-cdk/lib/api/util/cloudformation.ts:144:13)
    at process._tickCallback (internal/process/next_tick.js:68:7)
The stack named DemoBucketStack is in a failed state: DELETE_FAILED (The following resource(s) failed to delete: [Bucket83908E77]. )

Checking the CFN, I see:

The bucket you tried to delete is not empty (Service: Amazon S3; Status Code: 409; Error Code: BucketNotEmpty; ...)

The CDK toolkit should try to retrieve & display this information if an operation fails rather than relying on the user to use the aws CLI or console to discover it themselves.

[rix0rrr]

It’s going to be there in the error message for the DELETE_FAILED of the bucket.

We should probably capture the resource-specific error messages and propagate them for better usability.

I’m starting to feel that this whole “deploy a CloudFormation stack and do monitoring/progress reporting etc” could be its own NPM library.

[github-actions[bot]]

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