Writing CloudFormation templates by hand is time consuming and error prone. Usually I know what is is that I’m trying to create and and know roughly what the options are, but remembering the exact syntax in json or YAML is near impossible.
VS Code has a number of extensions that can make this a lot easier. Tab code complete with plugins like “CloudFormation Snippets’ makes writing new templates incredibly quick and easy:
By default with this extension, type cfn then Tab to auto complete the skeleton of a CloudFormation template. If you have autocomplete on tab turned off you can turn it on in your VS Code settings, or manually use Ctrl-Space to trigger:
After pressing Tab you get an empty template:
As I’m writing a template for a new DynamoDB table, I enter dynamodb-table under Resources and Tab and it adds the skeleton ready to complete:
This saves time in having to look at what the required and optional attributes are, but unless I’m missing a feature it doesn’t have any auto completion to help select values for some attributes where valid values are from a list of options. For example, for DynamoDB BillingMode, the available options are PROVISIONED or PAY_PER_REQUEST. I can go look that up in the docs here, but it would be nice if it would offer tab complete for those too.
