Aws-cdk: from_hosted_zone_id fails when the object is referenced to retrieve a HZ name.

[rhboyd]

• I'm submitting a ...

  • [X] :beetle: bug report
  • [ ] :rocket: feature request
  • [ ] :books: construct library gap
  • [ ] :phone: security issue or vulnerability => Please see policy
  • [ ] :question: support request => Please see note at the top of this template.

• What is the current behavior?
  If the current behavior is a :beetle:bug:beetle:: Please provide the steps to reproduce
  I have a hosted zone that is created when I purchase a route53 domain. that domain has a Public Hosted Zone that AWS creates for me. I want to use this hosted zone to validate ACM Certificates through DNS. In order to do this in Python CDK, I am trying to leverage the aws_route53.HostedZone.from_hosted_zone_id method.

My first attempt looks like this:

    hosted_zone: route53.HostedZone = route53.HostedZone.from_hosted_zone_id(
            self,
            id="MyResolvedHZ",
            hosted_zone_id=props.hosted_zone_id
    )

    acm_cert: acm.Certificate = acm.DnsValidatedCertificate(
            self,
            "MyWebsiteCert",
            hosted_zone=hosted_zone,
            domain_name=props.domain_name
    )

which results in an error stating:
jsii.errors.JSIIError: HostedZone.fromHostedZoneId doesn't support "zoneName"
and points to the cause at the line domain_name=props.domain_name

If I change the method to this it works:

hosted_zone: route53.HostedZone = route53.HostedZone.from_hosted_zone_attributes(
            self,
            id="MyResolvedHZ",
            hosted_zone_id=props.hosted_zone_id,
            zone_name="rboyd.dev"
)

but this requires me to pass in the hosted zone name, hosted zone id, and the desired domain name (subdomain of hosted zone), when I should be able to do what I need with just the Hosted Zone Id and desired domain name since I assume HZ Ids are region unique within an account.

• What is the expected behavior (or behavior of feature suggested)?
  from_hosted_zone_id should create a IHostedZone that can be used by resources that need the Hosted Zone name as well

• What is the motivation / use case for changing the behavior or adding this feature?
  better UX? Who doesn't love that?

• Please tell us about your environment:

  • CDK CLI Version: 1.3.0 (build bba9914)
  • Module Version: 1.3.0
  • OS: OSX Mojave 10.14.6 (18G84)
  • Language: Python

• Other information
  My "full" Python code.

from aws_cdk import (
    aws_certificatemanager as acm,
    aws_route53 as route53,
    aws_cloudfront as cloudfront,
    aws_s3 as s3,
    aws_route53_targets as targets,
    aws_dynamodb as ddb,
    core
)


class BlogProps(object):
    def __init__(self, domain_name: str, hosted_zone_id: str):
        self._domain_name = domain_name
        self._hosted_zone_id = hosted_zone_id

    @property
    def domain_name(self) -> str:
        return self._domain_name

    @property
    def hosted_zone_id(self) -> str:
        return self._hosted_zone_id


class InfrastructureStack(core.Stack):

    def __init__(self, scope: core.Construct, id: str, props: BlogProps, **kwargs) -> None:
        super().__init__(scope, id, **kwargs)

        hosted_zone: route53.HostedZone = route53.HostedZone.from_hosted_zone_id(
            self,
            id="MyResolvedHZ",
            hosted_zone_id=props.hosted_zone_id
        )

        acm_cert: acm.Certificate = acm.DnsValidatedCertificate(
            self,
            "MyWebsiteCert",
            hosted_zone=hosted_zone,
            domain_name=props.domain_name
        )

        # We can keep the Read capacity low because we are going to use API Gateway Caching to reduce the load on our DB
        blog_post_table: ddb.Table = ddb.Table(
            self,
            "BlogPostTable",
            partition_key=ddb.Attribute(name="PartitionKey", type=ddb.AttributeType.STRING),
            sort_key=ddb.Attribute(name="SortKey", type=ddb.AttributeType.STRING),
            read_capacity=5,
            write_capacity=5

        )

        site_bucket = s3.Bucket(
            self,
            'SiteBucket',
            bucket_name=props.domain_name,
            website_index_document='index.html',
            website_error_document='error.html',
            public_read_access=True
        )

        alias_configuration = cloudfront.AliasConfiguration(
            acm_cert_ref=acm_cert.certificate_arn,
            names=[props.domain_name],
            ssl_method=cloudfront.SSLMethod.SNI,
            security_policy=cloudfront.SecurityPolicyProtocol.TLS_V1_1_2016
        )

        source_configuration = cloudfront.SourceConfiguration(
            s3_origin_source=cloudfront.S3OriginConfig(
                s3_bucket_source=site_bucket
            ),
            behaviors=[cloudfront.Behavior(is_default_behavior=True)]
        )

        distribution = cloudfront.CloudFrontWebDistribution(
            self,
            'SiteDistribution',
            alias_configuration=alias_configuration,
            origin_configs=[source_configuration]
        )

        route53.ARecord(
            self,
            'SiteAliasRecord',
            record_name=props.domain_name,
            target=route53.AddressRecordTarget.from_alias(targets.CloudFrontTarget(distribution)),
            zone=hosted_zone
        )

        core.CfnOutput(self, 'Bucket', value=site_bucket.bucket_name)
        core.CfnOutput(self, 'ACMCert', value=acm_cert.certificate_arn)
        core.CfnOutput(self, 'TableName', value=blog_post_table.table_name)

[revolutionisme]

Yup, hit the same issue as well, using the "from_hosted_zone_attributes" for now.

[rhboyd]

This should probably be reclassified as a UX Issue. It's not clear to new developers when to use from_id() from_name() or from_attributes() for most resources.

I don't think this is an actual bug, it just leads to people using the wrong methods.

[rix0rrr]

I think you might want to use HostedZone.fromLookup().

Closing this issue, please reopen if you feel this was closed in error.

[rhboyd]

I think this should be made into a docs issue. This exact issue (from_id() vs from_name() vs lookup()) has been brought up at least 3 times in the past two weeks. Enough people are misled by it that the docs could probably be made a bit clearer.

[garyd203]

I don't think this outcome is satisfactory (closing the issue as "wont-fix"). The use case is that users want to be able to get the domain of a HostedZone from it's zone ID (either directly, or for passing to some other CDK function), and there is no solution for this.

The root issue here is not documentation (although that's certainly contributing to confusion). Rather, the problem is that some users expect the fromXxx functions in the CDK API to produce a real object that represents contextual information determined at synthesize time (like VPC.fromLookup does) - not a mock object that only reflects the values that were put into it.

Further, it is a reasonable expectation that if an object implements an interface (such as IHostedZone), then it will implement all the functionality in that interface.

At the very least, we should make a clearer distinction between methods that perform a contextual lookup, and methods that create a partial mock (eg. have a dedicated mock class and do something like FakeHostedZone.withHostedZoneId()).

[jkodroff]

I would agree with @garyd203 here in that throwing an exception on an interface member is a violation of the Liskov Substitution Principle. (See the part about throwing a NotImplementedException.)

I think the solution here is to adjust the model, something like adding a deprecation warning where appropriate and then changing from_hosted_zone_id to return something other than IHostedZone (sorry for mixing languages here) since the returned value does not correctly implement the interface.

Since I would consider the LSP to be fairly critical to design of a tool like CDK, I would ask that the maintainers reopen this issue.

[kjellski]

I ran into this just now and the error one is getting is very misleading as well as the implementation of the IHostedZone interface as the return type not quite accurate to be hones. I'd classify this as a bug/defect as well. The method does not return an IHostedZone, right? Could you point me to the documentation I should read about this?

[john-tipper]

I, too, think this is definitely a bug. This will cause the same error:

IHostedZone hostedZone = HostedZone.fromHostedZoneId(this, "my-hosted-zone", "someZoneId");

DnsValidatedCertificate authCertificate = DnsValidatedCertificate.Builder.create(this, "my-certificate")
                .domainName(domainName)
                .region("us-east-1")
                .hostedZone(hostedZone)
                .build();

I have obtained an IHostedZone and passed into a method that wants one, yet there is an error thrown.

[bahrmichael]

I just stumbled upon this, too. Based on the CDK docs I expect fromHostedZoneId to give me an IHostedZone that I can use in further CDK operations.

[radu-malliu]

Just ran into this issue, fromHostedZoneId allegedly returns an IPublicHostedZone, but addDelegation can't use it:

// subZone looks like this:
// {hostedZoneId: 'XXXX'}

props.subZones.forEach(subZone => {
  var subZoneConstruct = PublicHostedZone.fromPublicHostedZoneId(
    this, 'subZone', subZone.hostedZoneId
  );
  this.rootZone.addDelegation(
    subZoneConstruct,
    {ttl: core.Duration.seconds(60)}
  );
});

[ophilli]

I also just ran into this issue while trying to use fromPublicHostedZoneId to create an ARecord.

[ricardosllm]

Also just ran into this when wanting to define a ApplicationLoadBalancedFargateService with a domain_zone

I should be able to retrieve an existing r53 hosted zone to use here

[mimozell]

Same experience when trying to create a record in a hostedzone when I only have the ID and use fromHostedZoneId.