Former

CloudFormation supports lots of different AWS Resources with many parameters. Remembering all of them is a pain and slows down development dramatically.

To make this faster Former lets you create a full CF resource example for any supported Resource. It parses the CloudFormation Resource Specification to get the definition for all resources.

Example

You can create an example for any aws resource by calling former with the service and resource name. In the following example we're creating an AWS::IAM::User Resource:

root@e41871e1eb3e:/app# former iam user
Resources:
  AWSIAMUser:
    Parameters:
      Groups:
      - String
      LoginProfile:
        Password: String - Required
        PasswordResetRequired: Boolean
      ManagedPolicyArns:
      - String
      Path: String
      Policies:
      - PolicyDocument: Json - Required
        PolicyName: String - Required
      UserName: String
    Type: AWS::IAM::User

Some Resources also have a subtype (e.g. LoginProfile for the IAM::User). If you only want to show the subtype you can add it as a third parameter:

root@e41871e1eb3e:/app# former iam user loginprofile
Resources:
  AWSIAMUserLoginProfile:
    Parameters:
      Password: String - Required
      PasswordResetRequired: Boolean
    Type: AWS::IAM::User.LoginProfile

Of course this is not valid CloudFormation as the LoginProfile is not a valid CF Resource. But it helps when you want to get a quick overview for a subtype.

Options

• --json Print output in json instead of yaml
• --docs Open the AWS docs to the resource specified