How to provide tags for the stack in CloudFormation Template

Question

For billing purposes i want to use company specific Tags to the resources that i create in AWS . I am using a cloud formation template to spin up our Elastic Beanstalk instance and other resources. When I use the CloudFormation console to create a stack it asks me for Tags in the page after parameters. I have to manually input the Tags for that stack.

However is there a way to specify those Tags (Tags for the stack) with in the cloud formation template itself? That way the Tag gets propagated to the other resources?

Answer 1

In the template anatomy, you cant set stack-level tags directly. However you can create a wrapper template, having a single resource of AWS::CloudFormation::Stack.

You can define stack-level tags on that resource:

{
  "AWSTemplateFormatVersion": "2010-09-09",
  "Description": "WrapperTemplate",

  "Resources": {
    "WrappedStackWithStackLevelTags": {
      "Type" : "AWS::CloudFormation::Stack",
      "Properties" : {
        "Tags" : [ { "Key" : "Stage", "Value" : "QA" } ],
        "TemplateURL" : "your-original-template-s3-url"
      }
    }
  }
}

Comments

Is wrapper template going to be a main template and the original template going to be a nested template?

I tried to create a wrapper template as you suggested, then upload the wrapper template when update the stack from the Console, I got error that some resources such as LambdaExecutionRole, SNSTopic, LogGroup, ECSTaskRole etc cannot be created. 

My original template creates S3 bucket, Lambda function, SNSTopic, LogGroup etc.

Any idea is appreciated.