Templated stack name

[gtie]

I often need to have a few flavors of a single template - like prod, dev, test. I'm passing the env as a stack parameter.

There are two pieces that don't quite fit in this scenario:

• I use the convenient automatic stack name. I can no longer run rain deploy mystack.yaml --params Env=dev because the stack will be overwritten when I e.g. deploy the Prod version. I have to specify an explicit stack name once I introduce different environments.
• I don't see a good way to tie the stack name to a certain paramter. I can do rain deploy mystack.yaml --params Env=dev mystack-dev, but 1) it's long; 2) there is unnecessary repetition; 3) it's awfully easy to mix-up the stack name vs the param. It basically calls for yet layer of scripting, which I'm trying to avoid.

Am I missing some smarter way to do stack names + params based on environment? I was thinking that supporting (templated?) stack name in the rain configuration file might be a convenient way to hard-link stack names and sets of parameters.

[ericzbeard]

Are you proposing the addition of StackName to the nodes we parse in the config file? That would be very simple to implement, and I don't think it would break anything. I just merged a PR to make the file flexible enough to also act as the input to Git sync config, so we would need to make sure it doesn't break there.