aws-cdk: Any good guides or suggestions for folder structure for web applications?

Question

context: I mostly do rails development along with webpacker. Webpacker puts a package.json at the root of the project.

I was wondering what suggestions people might have for adding aws-cdk into a basic rails application (or any type of web application framework) to make a nice deployment pipeline?

This I've thought about for directory structure:

• Adding a .infrastructure folder to the root of the project. This is where all my cdk code would reside. What I don't like about this is during the deploy pipeline I would need to cd into that directoy and run yarn install. Also wouldn't like how I'd have to prefix all my paths with ../ if I need to reference resources outside of the directory (e.g. Dockerfile)
• Moving cdk.json to the root of my project. This would solve the path prefix problem but I'd still need todo something along these lines cd .infrastructure && yarn install && cd .. && cdk deploy
• Use something like lerna or yarn workspaces? Not sure how much I'd need to configure to webpacker to with those tools.

I tend to over think things way too much...

Am I over complicating this or is a "fullstack engineer" really hard work sometimes? 😅

Answer 1

If you are interested in combining your Infrastructure as Code with your application's deployment strategy you should look into cdk-pipelines. This way, you would just run cdk deploy and all of the build commands would be seperate from the deployment and run as part of the CI/CD build project. I work in .NET but this is how I've structured the folders:

my-repo
    my-cool-project
        src
           MyApi
           MyWebApp
        cdk
           cdk.json
           ...

Dockerfiles live in 'MyApi', and 'MyWebApp'.