(deploy): Support changing stack name at deploy time

[twasink]

Describe the feature

Add an option to cdk deploy to specify the stack name.

Use Case

It's not uncommon to want to have multiple similar configured stacks. Currently, CDK requires that you specify the stack name during the synth stage - but CloudFormation uses the stack name at deploy time.

It would be handy if you could override the synth'd stack name during cdk deploy.

Proposed Solution

No response

Other Information

cdk synth puts the stack name in the generated manifest.json file. You can edit that file without consequence, allowing a workaround.

Acknowledgements

• I may be able to implement this feature request
• This feature might incur a breaking change

AWS CDK Library version (aws-cdk-lib)

unknown

AWS CDK CLI version

2.1135.1

Environment details (OS name and version, etc.)

Windows, not that it should matter.

[twasink]

Quick clarification: I'm aware that you can have multiple stacks inside a CDK app, so I'm not really asking for a way to override the singular stack name.

However, the cdk deploy command does deploy a singular stack. Adding an option to customise the stack name at deployment time would be useful.

[pahud]

Hi @twasink,

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 🔴 Reported State                                              │
│ No way to override the CFN stack name at cdk deploy time       │
└──────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┘
                               │
                               ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 🔍 Root Cause                                                  │
│ Name is baked into manifest.json at synth; CLI exposes no      │
│ flag, though toolkit-lib already has a deployName override     │
└──────────────────────────────┬─────────────────────────────────┘
                               │
                               ▼
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ 🟢 Suggested Fix                                               │
│ Try context-parameterized stackName first (works today);       │
│ CLI flag would live in aws-cdk-cli if still needed             │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Thanks for the clear write-up. Since this is a feature request I did not run a deployment to reproduce, but from the source I can confirm the current behavior: the stack name is resolved when the cloud assembly artifact is loaded, and interestingly the deployment engine in toolkit-lib already accepts a deployName override internally — it is just not exposed as a CLI flag.

Before going further down the CLI-flag path, I would suggest trying this — since cdk deploy re-synthesizes by default, it gets you per-invocation naming today with zero manifest editing:

const suffix = app.node.tryGetContext(nameSuffix) ?? 'default';
new MyStack(app, 'MyStack', { stackName: `my-app-${suffix}` });

cdk deploy -c nameSuffix=blue
cdk deploy -c nameSuffix=green

This resolves the name at synth time (before your deployed resources, tags, or any cross-stack exports are computed), so — unlike a hypothetical post-synth --stack-name override — nothing embedded in the template ends up stale. It should be a drop-in replacement for the manifest.json hand-edit you are doing today.

Could you give this a try and let us know if it covers your use case? If there is still a gap — for example if you need the name to vary without touching the CDK app's context inputs at all — let us dig into that specific scenario. Worth knowing separately: the CDK CLI itself now lives in the aws/aws-cdk-cli repo, so if a CLI-level change ends up being the right answer, this issue would move there.

[twasink]

It won't cover my use case. I'm using this inside a CI pipeline, where the CI tool produces an artefact containing the synth'd app. This is then used later to deploy multiple stacks, differing by parameter values and (importantly) the stack name.

This would require the "hypothetical post-synth --stack-name override"