This is the AWS CDK v2 Developer Guide. The older CDK v1 entered maintenance on June 1, 2022 and ended support on June 1, 2023.

Context values and the AWS CDK

Context values are key-value pairs that can be associated with an app, stack, or construct. They may be supplied to your app from a file (usually either cdk.json or cdk.context.json in your project directory) or on the command line.

The CDK Toolkit uses context to cache values retrieved from your AWS account during synthesis. Values include the Availability Zones in your account or the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) IDs currently available for Amazon EC2 instances. Because these values are provided by your AWS account, they can change between runs of your CDK application. This makes them a potential source of unintended change. The CDK Toolkit's caching behavior "freezes" these values for your CDK app until you decide to accept the new values.

Imagine the following scenario without context caching. Let's say you specified "latest Amazon Linux" as the AMI for your Amazon EC2 instances, and a new version of this AMI was released. Then, the next time you deployed your CDK stack, your already-deployed instances would be using the outdated ("wrong") AMI and would need to be upgraded. Upgrading would result in replacing all your existing instances with new ones, which would probably be unexpected and undesired.

Instead, the CDK records your account's available AMIs in your project's cdk.context.json file, and uses the stored value for future synthesis operations. This way, the list of AMIs is no longer a potential source of change. You can also be sure that your stacks will always synthesize to the same AWS CloudFormation templates.

Not all context values are cached values from your AWS environment. AWS CDK feature flags are also context values. You can also create your own context values for use by your apps or constructs.

Context keys are strings. Values may be any type supported by JSON: numbers, strings, arrays, or objects.

Many context values are associated with a particular AWS environment, and a given CDK app can be deployed in more than one environment. The key for such values includes the AWS account and Region so that values from different environments do not conflict.

The following context key illustrates the format used by the AWS CDK, including the account and Region.

availability-zones:account=123456789012:region=eu-central-1

Sources of context values

Context values can be provided to your AWS CDK app in six different ways:

The project file cdk.context.json is where the AWS CDK caches context values retrieved from your AWS account. This practice avoids unexpected changes to your deployments when, for example, a new Availability Zone is introduced. The AWS CDK does not write context data to any of the other files listed.

Context values are scoped to the construct that created them; they are visible to child constructs, but not to parents or siblings. Context values that are set by the AWS CDK Toolkit (the cdk command) can be set automatically, from a file, or from the --context option. Context values from these sources are implicitly set on the App construct. Therefore, they're visible to every construct in every stack in the app.

Your app can read a context value using the construct.node.tryGetContext method. If the requested entry isn't found on the current construct or any of its parents, the result is undefined. (Alternatively, the result could be your language's equivalent, such as None in Python.)

Context methods

The AWS CDK supports several context methods that enable AWS CDK apps to obtain contextual information from the AWS environment. For example, you can get a list of Availability Zones that are available in a given AWS account and Region, using the stack.availabilityZones method.

The following are the context methods:

If a required context value isn't available, the AWS CDK app notifies the CDK Toolkit that the context information is missing. Next, the CLI queries the current AWS account for the information and stores the resulting context information in the cdk.context.json file. Then, it executes the AWS CDK app again with the context values.

Viewing and managing context

Use the cdk context command to view and manage the information in your cdk.context.json file. To see this information, use the cdk context command without any options. The output should be something like the following.

Context found in cdk.json:

┌───┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ # │ Key                                                         │ Value                                                   │
├───┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 1 │ availability-zones:account=123456789012:region=eu-central-1 │ [ "eu-central-1a", "eu-central-1b", "eu-central-1c" ]   │
├───┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ 2 │ availability-zones:account=123456789012:region=eu-west-1    │ [ "eu-west-1a", "eu-west-1b", "eu-west-1c" ]            │
└───┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Run cdk context --reset KEY_OR_NUMBER to remove a context key. If it is a cached value, it will be refreshed on the next cdk synth.

To remove a context value, run cdk context --reset, specifying the value's corresponding key or number. The following example removes the value that corresponds to the second key in the preceding example. This value represents the list of Availability Zones in the Europe (Ireland) Region.

cdk context --reset 2

Context value
availability-zones:account=123456789012:region=eu-west-1
reset. It will be refreshed on the next SDK synthesis run.

Therefore, if you want to update to the latest version of the Amazon Linux AMI, use the preceding example to do a controlled update of the context value and reset it. Then, synthesize and deploy your app again.

cdk synth

To clear all of the stored context values for your app, run cdk context --clear, as follows.

cdk context --clear

Only context values stored in cdk.context.json can be reset or cleared. The AWS CDK does not touch other context values. Therefore, to protect a context value from being reset using these commands, you might copy the value to cdk.json.

AWS CDK Toolkit --context flag

Use the --context (-c for short) option to pass runtime context values to your CDK app during synthesis or deployment.

cdk synth --context key=value MyStack

To specify multiple context values, repeat the --context option any number of times, providing one key-value pair each time.

cdk synth --context key1=value1 --context key2=value2 MyStack

When synthesizing multiple stacks, the specified context values are passed to all stacks. To provide different context values to individual stacks, either use different keys for the values, or use multiple cdk synth or cdk deploy commands.

Context values passed from the command line are always strings. If a value is usually of some other type, your code must be prepared to convert or parse the value. You might have non-string context values provided in other ways (for example, in cdk.context.json). To make sure this kind of value works as expected, confirm that the value is a string before converting it.

Example

Following is an example of using an existing Amazon VPC using AWS CDK context.

TypeScript

import * as cdk from 'aws-cdk-lib';
import * as ec2 from 'aws-cdk-lib/aws-ec2';
import { Construct } from 'constructs';

export class ExistsVpcStack extends cdk.Stack {

  constructor(scope: Construct, id: string, props?: cdk.StackProps) {
  
    super(scope, id, props);
    
    const vpcid = this.node.tryGetContext('vpcid');
    const vpc = ec2.Vpc.fromLookup(this, 'VPC', {
      vpcId: vpcid,
    });
    
    const pubsubnets = vpc.selectSubnets({subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC});
    
    new cdk.CfnOutput(this, 'publicsubnets', {
      value: pubsubnets.subnetIds.toString(),
    });
  }
}

JavaScript

const cdk = require('aws-cdk-lib');
const ec2 = require('aws-cdk-lib/aws-ec2');

class ExistsVpcStack extends cdk.Stack {

  constructor(scope, id, props) {
  
    super(scope, id, props);
    
    const vpcid = this.node.tryGetContext('vpcid');
    const vpc = ec2.Vpc.fromLookup(this, 'VPC', {
      vpcId: vpcid
    });
    
    const pubsubnets = vpc.selectSubnets({subnetType: ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC});
    
    new cdk.CfnOutput(this, 'publicsubnets', {
      value: pubsubnets.subnetIds.toString()
    });
  }
}

module.exports = { ExistsVpcStack }

Python

import aws_cdk as cdk
import aws_cdk.aws_ec2 as ec2
from constructs import Construct

class ExistsVpcStack(cdk.Stack):

    def __init__(scope: Construct, id: str, **kwargs):
  
        super().__init__(scope, id, **kwargs)
    
        vpcid = self.node.try_get_context("vpcid")
        vpc = ec2.Vpc.from_lookup(self, "VPC", vpc_id=vpcid)
    
        pubsubnets = vpc.select_subnets(subnetType=ec2.SubnetType.PUBLIC)
    
        cdk.CfnOutput(self, "publicsubnets",
            value=pubsubnets.subnet_ids.to_string())

Java

import software.amazon.awscdk.CfnOutput;

import software.amazon.awscdk.services.ec2.Vpc;
import software.amazon.awscdk.services.ec2.VpcLookupOptions;
import software.amazon.awscdk.services.ec2.SelectedSubnets;
import software.amazon.awscdk.services.ec2.SubnetSelection;
import software.amazon.awscdk.services.ec2.SubnetType;
import software.constructs.Construct;

public class ExistsVpcStack extends Stack {
    public ExistsVpcStack(Construct context, String id) {
        this(context, id, null);
    }
    
    public ExistsVpcStack(Construct context, String id, StackProps props) {
        super(context, id, props);
        
        String vpcId = (String)this.getNode().tryGetContext("vpcid");
        Vpc vpc = (Vpc)Vpc.fromLookup(this, "VPC", VpcLookupOptions.builder()
                .vpcId(vpcId).build());

        SelectedSubnets pubSubNets = vpc.selectSubnets(SubnetSelection.builder()
                .subnetType(SubnetType.PUBLIC).build());
        
        CfnOutput.Builder.create(this, "publicsubnets")
                .value(pubSubNets.getSubnetIds().toString()).build();                
    }
}

C#

using Amazon.CDK;
using Amazon.CDK.AWS.EC2;
using Constructs;

class ExistsVpcStack : Stack
{
    public ExistsVpcStack(Construct scope, string id, StackProps props) : base(scope, id, props)
    {
        var vpcId = (string)this.Node.TryGetContext("vpcid");
        var vpc = Vpc.FromLookup(this, "VPC", new VpcLookupOptions
        {
            VpcId = vpcId
        });

        SelectedSubnets pubSubNets = vpc.SelectSubnets([new SubnetSelection
        {
            SubnetType = SubnetType.PUBLIC
        }]);

        new CfnOutput(this, "publicsubnets", new CfnOutputProps {
            Value = pubSubNets.SubnetIds.ToString()
        });
    }
}

You can use cdk diff to see the effects of passing in a context value on the command line:

cdk diff -c vpcid=vpc-0cb9c31031d0d3e22

Stack ExistsvpcStack
Outputs
[+] Output publicsubnets publicsubnets: {"Value":"subnet-06e0ea7dd302d3e8f,subnet-01fc0acfb58f3128f"}

The resulting context values can be viewed as shown here.

cdk context -j

{
  "vpc-provider:account=123456789012:filter.vpc-id=vpc-0cb9c31031d0d3e22:region=us-east-1": {
    "vpcId": "vpc-0cb9c31031d0d3e22",
    "availabilityZones": [
      "us-east-1a",
      "us-east-1b"
    ],
    "privateSubnetIds": [
      "subnet-03ecfc033225be285",
      "subnet-0cded5da53180ebfa"
    ],
    "privateSubnetNames": [
      "Private"
    ],
    "privateSubnetRouteTableIds": [
      "rtb-0e955393ced0ada04",
      "rtb-05602e7b9f310e5b0"
    ],
    "publicSubnetIds": [
      "subnet-06e0ea7dd302d3e8f",
      "subnet-01fc0acfb58f3128f"
    ],
    "publicSubnetNames": [
      "Public"
    ],
    "publicSubnetRouteTableIds": [
      "rtb-00d1fdfd823c82289",
      "rtb-04bb1969b42969bcb"
    ]
  }
}