What is Totem?

Totem is a project that uses AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) constructs and a Command Line Interface (CLI) to manage and deploy cloud resources.

Totem’s primary purpose is to read a declarative config file and generate the appropriate GitHub Actions configuration and AWS CDK infrastructure that will provision and deploy the services configured within the totem config file.

Totem is designed to be the app target for a standard CDK application. In it’s simplest form this can look like cdk synth --app "totem synth".

When CDK synthesizes the Totem app, it will generate a dynamic CDK application based on the configuration found in your .totemrc.* file. In addition to generating a CDK app, Totem will also generate the appropriate GitHub Actions configuration to to build and deploy the application on push to GitHub.