How to only generate the cloudformation-template-update-stack.json and serverless-state.json files? No zip files

[jlamb1]

I am attempting to get reusable artifacts for different environments. They all use the same stage, but i'd like to be able to deploy all my zip files as the same generated versions to different dev environments.

I can use sls package to generate everything, then manually upload the zips to an s3 bucket.

Then in CI, I can copy those zips down into their correct locations, and do sls deploy --package $(pwd)/.serverless to deploy those zips to different environments.

However, in order to do that, I need cloudformation-template-update-stack.json and serverless-state.json files to exist, and they need to be generated per environment it seems.

So far, the only way i've been able to do that is by running another sls package, then deleting the resulting zips, which means I need to rebuild 5 times for 5 different environments, then delete them, then download the s3 versioned zips I want. This isn't great for speed, and is pretty hacky.

I was able to find that the package command has these LifecycleEvents:

  lifecycleEvents: [
    'cleanup',
    'initialize',
    'setupProviderConfiguration',
    'createDeploymentArtifacts',
    'compileLayers',
    'compileFunctions',
    'compileEvents',
    'finalize',
  ],

Is there perhaps a way to skip the createDeploymentArtifacts or something similar, so I can just output those json files? I know I can do sls deploy function -f to simply swap the zips, but I do want the cloudformation to be updated if needed.

I was attempting a custom plugin like

class CustomPackagePlugin {
  constructor(serverless, options) {
    this.serverless = serverless;
    this.options = options;

    this.commands = {
      prepackage: {
        usage: 'Runs prepackage logic',
        lifecycleEvents: ['runPrepackage'],
      },
    };

    this.hooks = {
      'prepackage:runPrepackage': this.runPrepackage.bind(this),
      'before:package:initialize': this.beforePackageInitialize.bind(this),
    };
  }

  async runPrepackage() {
    // Log that the custom plugin is running prepackage logic
    this.serverless.cli.log('Running prepackage logic');
  }

  async beforePackageInitialize() {
    // Perform setup-related logic here
    this.serverless.cli.log('Running setupProviderConfiguration logic');
    // This is where you can add logic similar to setupProviderConfiguration
  }
}

module.exports = CustomPackagePlugin;

But i haven't had luck tapping into the right hooks so it goes through the package setup, but just skips compiling the zip artifacts