Manual Approval step - Ability to customize email body programmatically

Question

The current implementation CodePipeline is very nice in regards to having the ability to temporarily step the pipeline and ask for manual approval (e.g. by email or whoever subscribed to the SNS topic).  
  
One really great addition to that manual approval would be to configure the body of the Manual approval email with some template syntax or variables. Here's an example:  
  
Our CodePipeline includes a step that generates output from "cdk synth --output ./cdk.out". We use this output in a subsequent step to provision AWS infrastructure. Between the two steps there is the manual review step (so that a DevOps team member can review that we are not deploying a CDK stack that would break the infrastructure). It would have been really useful if we directly send the "cdk synth" output in the email body, so the DevOps don't have to fiddle with he AWS CodePipeline console UI, download artifacts from S3, unzip them, etc...

Answer

Thank you for the suggestion to add a template syntax and/or variables to the manual approval action. We recently added the ability to pass variables between actions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/latest/userguide/reference-variables.html. The length of a CDK-generated template may be too large to use directly as a variable, but you might be able to link a commit, pipeline execution, etc.

Manual Approval step - Ability to customize email body programmatically

Relevant content