Suggestion / discussion - make Sceptre project more modular #1060

Subject of the issue

There have been times where I would like to integrate Sceptre within an external workflow or process, but couldn't due to the fact that it's tightly coupled with its CLI interface.

For example, in my Python project I would like to be able to do something like this:

from sceptre import SceptreProject

my_project = SceptreProject(path='/path/to/project', config_path='/path/to/project/config', templates_path='/path/to/project/templates')

my_stack = my_project.get_stack('prod/database/rds.yaml')

my_stack.launch()

my_stack.delete(force=True)

Unfortunately, Sceptre wasn't really designed with this in mind. When trying to hack Sceptre into other python projects, I've found that there are many assumptions made in the code about filesystem structures (config must be in ./config, templates must be in ./templates, if the current working directory is not set to the project then the deployments will fail..).

When integrating Sceptre deployments into larger projects, I've managed to get the job done by templating a shell command and dumping it into the Python subprocess.call() function, but the solution is not very elegant, doesn't perform well and is quite error prone.

Your environment

• Sceptre 1.5