Output command

[skorfmann]

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Description

When a stack has no changes, the apply is omitted and therefore no outputs are printed.

Two things here:

• cdktf deploy should always print outputs regardless of changes being present
• introduce cdktf output to explicitly retrieve outputs only

[ansgarm]

Seconding in on this.
For my CDK Day talk I had to build a rather ugly workaround to get outputs which I used for tests.

[matschaffer]

I solved this by putting this in my package.json:

  "scripts": {
    ...
    "outputs": "cd cdktf.out/stacks/my_stack; terraform output -json > outputs.json"
  },

That way I can at least just run yarn outputs and get a json file.

I can then read this json file from other scripts that helps complete provisioning beyond what I'm able to do with the terraform provider.

cdk output -json would be a welcome addition for that piece.

[ansgarm]

Ah, that's a nice workaround @matschaffer 💡 That reminds me of a similar thing I did for the dotenv config for a React frontend, however that does not make use of outputs but uses Terraform to write that file.
I have the feeling there might be a way to collect all outputs of a stack and write such an outputs.json file via Terraform 😄

[skorfmann]

I have the feeling there might be a way to collect all outputs of a stack and write such an outputs.json file via Terraform 😄

You're thinking about an Aspect here?

[kc-dot-io]

How about approaching this the same way that CDK does using --outputs-file?

[jsteinich]

How about approaching this the same way that CDK does using --outputs-file?

Having that consistency sounds like a good idea to me. Could still add the output command which accepts the same argument.

[github-actions]

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