This is the AWS CDK v1 Developer Guide. The older CDK v1 entered maintenance on June 1, 2022 and will now only receive critical bug fixes and security patches. New features will be developed for CDK v2 exclusively. Support for CDK v1 will end entirely on June 1, 2023. Migrate to CDK v2 to have access to the latest features and fixes.
The AWS CDK uses feature flags to enable potentially breaking behaviors
in a release. Flags are stored as Runtime context values in
cdk.json (or ~/.cdk.json) as shown here.
{
"app": "npx ts-node bin/tscdk.ts",
"context": {
"@aws-cdk/core:enableStackNameDuplicates": true
}
}The names of all feature flags begin with the NPM name of the package affected by the
particular flag. In the example above, this is @aws-cdk/core, the AWS CDK framework
itself, since the flag affects stack naming rules, a core AWS CDK function. AWS Construct
Library modules can also use feature flags.
Feature flags are disabled by default, so existing projects that do not specify the flag
will continue to work as expected with later AWS CDK releases. New projects created using
cdk init include flags enabling all features available in the release that
created the project. Edit cdk.json to disable any flags for which you
prefer the old behavior, or to add flags to enable new behaviors after upgrading the
AWS CDK.
See the CHANGELOG in a given release for a description of any new
feature flags added in that release. A list of all current feature flags can be found on
the AWS CDK GitHub repository in FEATURE_FLAGS.md
As feature flags are stored in cdk.json, they are not removed by the
cdk context --reset or cdk context --clear
commands.
