Importing AWS information from CloudFormation to CodeBuild - amazon-web-services

Question

I have a pipeline in AWS with Codestar, CodeBuild, CloudFormation, etc.
I am trying to figure out how to get information from the CloudFormation step returned to the CodeBuild step. Let me break it down:
I have a buildspec.yml for CodeBuild
# buildspec.yml
...
phases:
...
build:
commands:
- aws cloudformation package --region $REGION --template template.yml --s3-bucket $S3_BUCKET --output-template $OUTPUT_TEMPLATE
The above kicks off a CloudFormation build using our template.yml
# template.yml
...
S3BucketAssets:
Type: AWS::S3::Bucket
...
At this point, it creates a unique name for an S3 bucket. Awesome. Now, for step 2 in my buildspec.yml for CodeBuild, I want to push items to the S3 bucket just created in the CloudFormation template. BUT, I don't know how to get the dynamically created name of the S3 bucket from the CloudFormation template. I want something similar to:
# buildspec.yml
...
phases:
...
build:
commands:
# this is the same step as shown above
- aws cloudformation package --region $REGION --template template.yml --s3-bucket $S3_BUCKET --output-template $OUTPUT_TEMPLATE
# this is the new step
- aws s3 sync dist_files/ s3://{NAME_OF_THE_NEW_S3_BUCKET}
How can I accomplish getting the dynamically named S3 bucket so that I can push to it?
I am aware that within a CloudFormation template, you can reference the S3 bucket name with something like !GetAtt [ClientWebAssets, WebsiteURL]. But, I do not know how to get that information out of the cloudformation template and back into the codebuild template.

Answer 1

You could move to using CodePipeline. Stage one would be deploying the application via cloudformation with an output artifact being the stack creation output
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/latest/userguide/reference-pipeline-structure.html#action-requirements