CDK Refactoring Tools

[Gtofig]

At the moment, when I move constructs around in CDK, this results in logical IDs changing and resources being replaced during deployment, even stateful ones. This causes major pain, especially if it's a production service.

I would like CDK to offer a simpler way of refactoring code without having to worry about resource replacement.

Use Case

Refactoring code is a natural part of development, including CDK development. I don't want to have to worry about breaking production due to moving constructs around.

Proposed Solution

Option 1) Work with CloudFormation team to support resource logical ID renaming without replacement (maybe use CDK metadata as a key to identify that it's the same resource)

Option 2) Make it easier to hardcode logical IDs in CDK. At the moment it only works via L1 resources, but most constructs we deal with are not L1, therefore it becomes painful to manually set logical IDs. Perhaps Construct could expose a method to hardcode prefix for logical IDs

Other

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

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This is a 🚀 Feature Request

[eladb]

Are you familiar with renameLogicalId?

[eladb]

Transferring this to the RFC repo as this requires further discussion.

[Gtofig]

Are you familiar with renameLogicalId?

Yes, but this only works at L1 level, so if I have a high level construct which I move around, it becomes more complicated. Perhaps you have a pattern in mind for this?

[tdclark]

It also seems like a big ask to have to drop down to renameLogicalId every time I want to move/refactor a construct around my CDK app. Also, how would this function for composed constructs? If I have a construct that I vend to multiple apps, how would renameLogicalId help me move around some of the sub-constructs within the construct and not have impact on the users of the construct?

[tdclark]

Any updates here? It seems untenable to not allow folks to refactor CDK code after the first deployment without causing breakages.

[rix0rrr]

I think the better solution is to allow remapping construct paths at any point in the tree.

As long as that's a hierarchical operation we should be fine.

[foriequal0]

I use this https://gist.github.com/foriequal0/f1f4ea279fb64836e5fb38efefa133d7 while waiting for a feature that rename logical id in a stack