Hi everyone,

I’ve spent today implementing Cognito with AWS SAM and it took quite a while to work out what needed to be done – unfortunately there’s a lot of conflicting doco out there. Posting a sample template just in case it’s able to help anyone else out.

The first thing to do is to explicitly define you rest API. By default AWS SAM will generate one with a default logical id of ServerlessRestApi. You’ll need to override this:

Resources:
  # See links for more info
  # Referencing cognito authorizer: https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model/issues/512#issuecomment-411284092
  # Logical id is auto generated: https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model/blob/master/docs/internals/generated_resources.rst#api
  # Sample template.yml: https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model/blob/release/v1.8.0/examples/2016-10-31/api_cognito_auth/template.yaml
  MyCustomApi:
    Type: "AWS::Serverless::Api"
    Properties:
      StageName: Prod
      Auth: # We will eventually define other auth options here such as Usage Plans/Api Keys, AWS_IAM, and Resource Policies
        DefaultAuthorizer: MyCustomCognitoAuthorizer
        Authorizers:
          MyCustomCognitoAuthorizer:
            UserPoolArn: !GetAtt MyCustomCognitoUserPool.Arn # Can be a string, or array
            # Identity: # Optional
              # Header: ... # Optional; Default: Authorization
              # ValidationExpression: ...  # Optional; ensures the request header matches a pattern before checking in with the Authorizer endpoint; is there a default we can set for Cognito User Pools Auth?

You’ll also need to create a user pool and client:

# Creating a cognito user pool - https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model/blob/master/examples/2016-10-31/api_cognito_auth/template.yaml
  MyCustomCognitoUserPool:
    Type: AWS::Cognito::UserPool
    Properties:
      UserPoolName: !Ref CognitoUserPoolName
      # LambdaConfig:
        # PreSignUp: !GetAtt PreSignupLambdaFunction.Arn
      Policies:
        PasswordPolicy:
          MinimumLength: 8
      UsernameAttributes:
        - email
      Schema:
        - AttributeDataType: String
          Name: email
          Required: false

  MyCustomCognitoUserPoolClient:
    Type: AWS::Cognito::UserPoolClient
    Properties:
      UserPoolId: !Ref MyCustomCognitoUserPool
      ClientName: !Ref CognitoUserPoolClientName
      GenerateSecret: false

You then add the api id and the auth attribute to each of your function properties. If you’ve used the default authorizer property when defining the associated api you can override it by using authorizer: none.

GetBreedFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      Handler: breed.getBreedHandler
      Policies: arn:aws:iam::aws:policy/AmazonDynamoDBFullAccess
      Runtime: nodejs8.10
      Environment:
        Variables:
          TABLE_CAT_BREED: !Ref CatBreedTable
      Events:
        GetEvent:
          Type: Api
          Properties:
            Path: /breed/{breedId}
            Method: get
            RestApiId: !Ref MyCustomCustomApi
            Auth:
              Authorizer: NONE

Hopefully that’s able to help you out. If you run into any trouble I found the following link pretty useful: https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-application-model/blob/release/v1.8.0/examples/2016-10-31/api_cognito_auth/template.yaml