Welcome to Handel’s documentation!

Handel is a library that orchestrates your AWS deployments so you don’t have to.

Handel is built on top of CloudFormation with an aim towards easier AWS provisioning and deployments. You give Handel a configuration file (the Handel file) telling it what services you want in your application, and it wires them together for you.

Here’s an example Handel file defining a Beanstalk application to be deployed with an SQS queue and S3 bucket:

version: 1

name: my-first-handel-app

environments:
  dev:
    webapp:
      type: beanstalk
      path_to_code: .
      solution_stack: 64bit Amazon Linux 2017.09 v4.4.5 running Node.js
      dependencies:
      - bucket
      - queue
    bucket:
      type: s3
    queue:
      type: sqs

From this Handel file, Handel creates the appropriate CloudFormation templates for you, including taking care of all the tricky security bits to make the services be able to talk to each other.

Getting Started