Boto3 CloudFormation Status

Question

Is it possible to get the status of a CloudFormation stack? If so, how?

I'm creating a stack with:

client = boto3.client('cloudformation',)
response = client.create_stack(
    StackName=stackname,
    ...
)

I can see in the CloudFormation web UI that the stack successfully creates.

I've tried to get the status with:

print(client.describe_stacks(stack_name_or_id=hostname))

But that throws exception:

botocore.exceptions.ParamValidationError: Parameter validation failed:
Unknown parameter in input: "stack_name_or_id", must be one of: StackName, NextToken

So I tried to wait while the stack deploys and catch the exception with:

while True:
    time.sleep(5)
    try:
        print(client.describe_stacks(stack_name_or_id=stackname))
    except botocore.exceptions.ParamValidationError:
        pass

But I get no response at all; the print statement never gets called.

Answer 1

The error message:

Unknown parameter in input: "stack_name_or_id", must be one of: StackName, NextToken

clearly says you are passing invalid parameter name; stack_name_or_id.

In Boto3 describe_stacks, the expected parameter is: StackName

response = client.describe_stacks(
    StackName='string',
    NextToken='string'
)

For a running stack, you can pass stack name or stack ID. But for deleted stacks, you have to pass stack ID.

client.describe_stacks(StackName='mystack')

{u'Stacks': [{u'StackId': 'arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-1:.......
  'content-type': 'text/xml', 
  'date': 'Thu, 22 Jun 2017 14:54:46 GMT'}}}