awsrm

A remove command for AWS resources

This command line tool follows the Unix Philosophy of doing only one thing and doing it well:

It simplifies deleting over 250 AWS resource types across multiple accounts and regions.

Like other Unix-like tools, awsrm reveals its full power when combining it via pipes with other tools, such as awsls for listing AWS resources and grep for filtering by resource attributes.

Example

Delete resources by tags (or other attributes)

To delete, for example, all EC2 instances with tag Name=foo, run

  awsls instance -a tags | grep Name=foo | awsrm

To filter on multiple attributes, display them with awsls via the -a (--attributes) <comma-separated list> flag. Every attribute in the Terraform documentation (here are the attributes for aws_instance) can be used:

1. List resources via awsls with the attributes you want to filter on (here: -a tags)
2. Use standard tools like grep to filter resources
3. Pipe result to awsrm (nothing is deleted until you confirm)

Note: awsls output passes on profile and region information, so that awsrm knows for each resource in what account and region to delete it.

Depending on the type of resource, deletion can take some time. This GIF runs faster than EC2 instances are actually terminated; the shell prompt shows the real execution times in seconds.

Delete across multiple accounts and regions

List all instances with awsls in the AWS accounts associated with profile myaccount1 and myaccount2 in both regions us-west-2 and us-east-1 and pipe the result to awsrm:

awsls -p myaccount1,myaccount2 -r us-west-2,us-east-1 instance | awsrm

Delete by IDs

Delete specific resources by ID, for example, some IAM roles

awsrm iam_role db-cluster elb nginx

or VPCs

awsrm vpc vpc-1234 vpc-3456 vpc-7689

1. List resources via awsls to find out what resources to delete.
2. Use awsrm to delete the resources by resource type and ID(s)

Usage

Input via arguments:

awsrm [flags] <resource_type> <id> [<id>...]

Input via pipe:

awsls [flags] <resource_type> | awsrm

or

echo "<resource_type> <id> <profile> <region>" | awsrm

To see options available run awsrm --help.

Installation

Binary Releases

You can download a specific version on the releases page or use the following way to install to ./bin/:

curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jckuester/awsrm/master/install.sh | sh -s v0.2.0

Homebrew

Homebrew users can install by:

brew install jckuester/tap/awsrm

For more information on Homebrew taps please see the tap documentation.

Supported resources

This tool can not only delete any resource type that is supported by awsls, but any resource type covered by the Terraform AWS Provider.

Note: the prefix aws_ for resource types is optional. This means, for example, awsrm aws_instance <id> and awsrm instance <id> are both valid commands.

Disclaimer

You are using this tool at your own risk! I will not take responsibility if you delete any critical resources in your production environments.