Getting Started

This section walks you through getting Org Kickstart deployed into a new AWS account.

Prerequisites

Before running Org Kickstart you need:

• Terraform >= 1.0 (< 2.0)
• AWS CLI configured with credentials for the Management (Payer) account
• An S3 bucket for Terraform remote state
• A few manual “artisanal” steps completed in the AWS console (see Bootstrap)

Steps

1. Complete the Bootstrap steps in the AWS Console
2. Set up your local repository — copy the local-deploy sample, pin the module version, and create your <env>.tfvars / <env>.tfbackend
3. Initialize Terraform:

   make env=your-org tf-init
   

4. Create the Security Account first (required before full apply):

   terraform apply -var-file="your-org.tfvars" -target module.security_account
   

5. Deploy everything:

   make env=your-org tf-execute
   

   This runs tf-plan followed by tf-apply — saving the plan, applying it, and writing output-your-org.json to your state bucket.

For subsequent updates, use:

make env=your-org update

Using with an Existing Organization

If you already have an AWS Organization, see Importing an Existing Org for guidance on importing existing resources into Terraform state.

Example tfvars

See the Reference page for a full annotated example. The examples/local-deploy directory in the repository contains a sample layout with a Makefile, backend config template, and helper scripts for running Org Kickstart from your workstation. To pin to a specific release, see Releases.