AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) Toolkit
March 17, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
The AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) is an open-source software development framework to define cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS CloudFormation.
The AWS CDK consists of two main components:
- a class library, that you use to to model your infrastructure in code; and
- a toolkit, consisting of a CLI or a programmatic library, to act on those models.
This repository contains the code for the toolkit components. The class library repository is the main repository for the CDK project.
Getting Help
The best way to interact with our team is through GitHub, on the aws-cdk repository. You can open an issue and choose from one of our templates for bug reports, feature requests, documentation issues, or guidance.
If you have a support plan with AWS Support, you can also create a new support case.
You may also find help on these community resources:
- Look through the API Reference or Developer Guide
- The #aws-cdk Slack channel in cdk.dev
- Ask a question on Stack Overflow
and tag it with
aws-cdk
Contributing
We welcome community contributions and pull requests. See CONTRIBUTING.md for information on how to set up a development environment and submit code.
Structure of this repository
Here are the packages in this repository. See the README of each package for more information about it:
| Package | Description | Published? | Maintained? |
|---|---|---|---|
| aws-cdk | The CDK Toolkit CLI, main CLI interface to CDK projects. | Yes | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/toolkit-lib | A programmatic interface for the CDK Toolkit. | Yes | Yes |
| cdk | An alias for aws-cdk so you can run npx cdk even if it's not installed. | Yes | Yes |
| cdk-assets v3 | CLI component handling asset uploads, also used as a CLI in CDK Pipelines | Yes | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/cloud-assembly-schema | The contract between the CDK construct library and the CDK toolkit | Yes | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/cloudformation-diff | CLI component for diffing CloudFormation templates | Yes | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/cli-plugin-contract | TypeScript types for CLI plugins. | Yes | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/cdk-cli-wrapper | A deprecated attempt at building a programmatic interface for the CLI | No | No |
| @aws-cdk/node-bundle | A tool to build CLI bundles that include license attributions. | No | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/user-input-gen | A build tool for the CLI and toolkit-lib. | No | Yes |
| @aws-cdk/yarn-cling | A deprecated build tool for the CLI. | No | No |
Every package comes with its own unit tests. There is a companion repository to this one containing the integration tests. You can find it here: https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk-cli-testing
See the contributing guide for more information on this repository.
Compatibility
The CLI is always able to process CDK apps using a version of the Construct Library released before it. We recommend you always keep the CLI version up-to-date to get the latest features.
For more details on the compatibility model and specific versions that work together, see COMPATIBILITY.md.