How to add a wait time before executing a step in Bitbucket Pipeline

Question

I have a Bitbucket pipeline where it creates AWS resources using cloudformation and deploys website to it. But deployment fails even the cloudformation creates the stack correctly. What I think the issue is when the deployment happens cloudformation S3 bucket creation may not have been finished.

I have a Hugo website and I have created a bitbucket pipeline to deploy it to server. What it does is it creates S3 bucket using cloudformation to host the website and then upload the Hugo website to it. When I ran the steps in the pipeline manually in a terminal with a delay between each step, it happens successfully. But when it happens on Bitbucket pipeline it gave error saying the S3 bucket that I'm trying to upload content is not available. When I checked in AWS that bucket is actually there. That means Cloudformation has worked correctly. But when the files start to copy, the bucket may have not been available to upload the file. That's my assumption. Is there a workaround for this one. When doing it locally I can wait between the two commands of cloudformation creation and file copying. But how to handle it in Bitbucket pipeline environment. Following is my pipeline code.

pipelines:
  pull-requests:
    '**':
      - step:
          script:
            - aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name demo-web --template-body file://cloudformation.json --parameters ParameterKey=S3BucketName,ParameterValue=demo-web
            - hugo
            - aws s3 cp public/ s3://demo-web/ --recursive

How to handle this scenario in the correct way. Is there a workaround for this situation. Or is the problem that I have identified is not the actual problem.

Answer 1

First, to wait in bitbucket pipelines you should be able to just use sleep x where x is the number of seconds you want to sleep.

A different note - bear in mind that after the first subsequent run of this, deployment will potentially fail the next time as you are using create-stack which will fail if stack already exists...

Answer 2

Using the AWS CloudFormation API for this is best practice.

There is a wait command just as there is a create-stack command, the wait command and its options allows AWS to halt your processing until stack is in COMPLETE status before continuing.

Option 1: Put your stack creation command into a shell script and as a second step in your shell script you invoke the wait stack-create-complete command.

Then invoke that shell script in pipeline instead of the direct command.

Option 2: In your bitbucket pipeline, right after your create command, invoke the aws cloudformation await complete command before the upload/hugo command.

I prefer option one because it allows you to manipulate and trace the creation as you wish.

See documentation: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/cloudformation/wait/stack-create-complete.html

Using the CloudFormation API is great because you don't have to guess as to how long to wait, it is more guaranteed to be available.