project deploy cannot create payment credential providers; support Quick Create connectors first

[notgitika]

Summary

agentcore project deploy refuses any project declaring a PaymentCredentialProvider credential:

Error: Credential 'my-pay' is a PaymentCredentialProvider, which 'agentcore project deploy'
cannot create: CloudFormation has no payment credential provider resource, and a payment
provider needs vendor configuration (API key, wallet and authorization secrets) that
agentcore.json has no fields for. Remove the credential and any payment connector referencing
it to deploy the rest of the project.

That is deliberate — see #2089, which moved credential providers into CloudFormation. Failing fast beats half-creating a provider. This issue is the follow-up to actually support payments under project deploy.

A payment credential can only reach agentcore.json by hand today: agentcore project add credentials offers only api-key and oauth. So no documented flow produces this error yet.

Two paths, and the cheap one is already released

Quick Create — needs no credential provider at all

agentcore-l3-cdk-constructs#324 ("feat(payments): support Quick Create connectors") is on the L3's main and shipped in 0.1.0-alpha.49. A Quick Create connector needs no credentialProviderArn — the customer completes authorization out of band via a returned URL.

This is the path to do first. It closes the common case without touching the credential schema at all:

• make credentialName optional in src/projectSchemas/payment.ts
• add a Quick Create connector variant to the spec
• surface the returned authorizationUrl so the user knows how to finish setup
• src/assets/cdk/lib/cdk-stack.ts skips the credential-map lookup for those connectors

Unverified: whether Quick Create is Coinbase-specific. If StripePrivy has no Quick Create equivalent, it still needs the Manual path below. Confirm before scoping.

Manual — needs real work

The Manual path is what the fail-fast message describes, and the gap is genuine:

1. No CloudFormation resource. Unlike ApiKeyCredentialProvider and OAuth2CredentialProvider, there is no payment credential provider type usable from the stack, so the pattern fix(project): deploy credentials through CloudFormation, and stop deleting stacks #2089 established (CFN owns the provider, the CLI syncs the secret post-deploy) does not apply.

2. PaymentCredentialSchema has nowhere to put vendor configuration. It carries only {authorizerType, name, provider}. The API wants vendor identifiers and secrets:

   • CoinbaseCDP: API key ID + secret, wallet secret
   • StripePrivy: app ID, authorization ID, and their secrets

   The non-secret identifiers need schema fields. The secrets need the same .env.local-or-secretRef story the other two credential kinds have, which means extending credentialEnvVarName beyond its current one-suffix shape (_CLIENT_SECRET) to several per credential.

Also worth deciding here

agentcore project add credentials payment does not exist. Whichever path lands, the credential should be creatable without hand-editing agentcore.json.

Related

• fix(project): deploy credentials through CloudFormation, and stop deleting stacks #2089 — moves credential providers into CloudFormation; adds the fail-fast this issue removes
• credential provider follow-ups: name collisions, vendor change, and an untested secret-delete risk #2093 — the original credential-deploy issue and its remaining open items