Awesome AWS CDK - Part 2 - Setting up AWS CDK

What you will learn in this part

In this tutorial, you will learn:

• How to install AWS CDK

Let's go!

Pre-requisites

You are going to need:

• An AWS account with programmatic access
• Node.js

Setup

• Make sure you have Node.js setup
• Make sure your aws credentials are properly configured.

Here's an example of my AWS configured access files where I have my own personal aws account as the default profile and two other aws accounts for my work company -- acme-corp👨🏿‍💻.

AWS credentials file:

# Linux and MacOS: ~/.aws/credentials
# Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.aws\credentials

[default]
aws_access_key_id=xXXxxxxXXXXxxxxxxx
aws_secret_access_key=xxXXXXxxxXXxXxx

[acme-corp-prod-acc]
aws_access_key_id=xXXxxxxXXXXxxxxxxx
aws_secret_access_key=xxXXXXxxxXXxXxx

[acme-corp-dev-acc]
aws_access_key_id=xXXxxxxXXXXxxxxxxx
aws_secret_access_key=xxXXXXxxxXXxXxx

AWS config file:

# Linux and MacOS: ~/.aws/config
# Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.aws\config

[default]
region=us-west-2
output=json

[profile acme-corp-prod-acc]
region=us-west-2
output=json

[profile acme-corp-dev-acc]
region=us-west-2
output=json

• The AWS CDK will look for these files when it needs access to whatever AWS accounts it needs to deploy resources to.
• It helps that the IAM credentials used have administrator privileges when deploying resources as this will reduce a lot of headache regarding permissions.
• You can filter out permissions and privileges if you have a good understanding of AWS IAM and the permission needs of your deployments.

Install the AWS CDK globally (so that you can bootstrap a new CDK project in your language choice) in any folder

npm install -g aws-cdk

Check that its installed

cdk --version

That's it!

In the next part, we will set up a project with the cdk and deploy it!

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Hi I'm Emmanuel! I write about Software and DevOps.

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