Query CloudFormation Templates

Rely on cnquery to query and analyze AWS CloudFormation templates and AWS SAM (Serverless Application Model) templates. Explore resources, parameters, outputs, and mappings within your infrastructure-as-code configurations.

Requirements

To analyze CloudFormation templates with cnquery, you must have:

• cnquery installed on your workstation.
• An AWS CloudFormation or SAM template file.

Query a CloudFormation template

To open a cnquery shell and query a CloudFormation template:

cnquery shell cloudformation PATH

For example:

cnquery shell cloudformation ./templates/infrastructure.yaml

Or to query a SAM template:

cnquery shell cloudformation ./sam/template.yaml

Example queries

Once connected, you can query CloudFormation template resources.

This query retrieves all resources defined in the template:

cnquery> cloudformation.template.resources
cloudformation.template.resources: [
  0: cloudformation.resource type="AWS::EC2::Instance"
  1: cloudformation.resource type="AWS::S3::Bucket"
  ...
]

This query retrieves all parameters:

cnquery> cloudformation.template.parameters
cloudformation.template.parameters: [
  0: cloudformation.parameter name="InstanceType"
  1: cloudformation.parameter name="Environment"
  ...
]

This query retrieves outputs:

cnquery> cloudformation.template.outputs
cloudformation.template.outputs: [
  0: cloudformation.output name="InstanceId"
  ...
]

This query retrieves mappings:

cnquery> cloudformation.template.mappings
cloudformation.template.mappings: {
  ...
}

Exit the cnquery shell

To exit the cnquery shell, either press Ctrl + D or type exit.

Learn more

• To learn more about how the MQL query language works, read Write Effective MQL.

• For a list of all the CloudFormation resources and fields you can query, read the CloudFormation Resource Pack Reference.