Use CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND for nested stacks on CloudFormation

Question

I am trying to use nested stack and when my ChangeSet is being executed, I got this error:

Requires capabilities : [CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND]

I went and create a pipeline with cloudformation.

This can be use to create a pipeline:

Configuration:
  ActionMode: CHANGE_SET_REPLACE
  ChangeSetName: changeset
  RoleArn: ??
  Capabilities: CAPABILITY_IAM
  StackName: appsync-graphql
  TemplatePath: BuildArtifact::output.yaml

This can’t:

Configuration:
  ActionMode: CHANGE_SET_REPLACE
  ChangeSetName: changeset
  RoleArn: ??
  Capabilities: 
    - CAPABILITY_IAM
    - CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND
  StackName: appsync-graphql
  TemplatePath: BuildArtifact::output.yaml

The error was: “Value of property Configuration must be an object with String (or simple type) properties”

This is the closest docs that I find: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/APIReference/API_UpdateStack.html

It said: Type: Array of strings for capabilites, and the aws cli docs says similarly, but doesn’t give an example.

So I ran out of ideas about what else to try to have CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND capability.

Answer 1

I tried another variant and it worked!

Configuration:
  ..
  Capabilities: CAPABILITY_IAM,CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND
  ...

Answer 2

I got the answer from Keeton Hodgson, this cli command works:

sam deploy --template-file output.yaml --stack-name <AppName> --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND

Notice that there is no comma.

I still don't know how to change the pipeline template for it to work.

Answer 3

I tried the solutions above and what worked for me today (June 2020) using the higher level sam was adding a space between the capabilities listed. It's complete insanity that there's no resilience in this text file interpretation. SAM's cli is open source so I guess I could put my code where my mouth is and submit a PR. Anyway.

samconfig.toml:

...
capabilities = "CAPABILITY_IAM CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND"
...

Then:

sam deploy

Output:

...
Capabilities               : ["CAPABILITY_IAM", "CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND"]
...