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Overview

Remove all resources from an AWS account.

aws-nuke is stable, but it is likely that not all AWS resources are covered by it. Be encouraged to add missing resources and create a Pull Request or to create an Issue.

Destructive Tool

Be aware that this is a very destructive tool, hence you have to be very careful while using it. Otherwise, you might delete production data.

What's New in Version 3

Migration Guide

There is only one breaking change between version 2 and 3, but see the migration guide for more information.

This is not a comprehensive list, but here are some of the highlights:

History of this Fork

This is a full fork of the original tool written by the folks over at rebuy-de. This fork became necessary after attempting to make contributions and respond to issues to learn that the current maintainers only have time to work on the project about once a month and while receptive to bringing in other people to help maintain, made it clear it would take time, but overall got the feeling that they wanted to maintain full control, which is understandable. Considering the feedback cycle was already weeks on initial communications, I had to make the hard decision to fork and maintain it.

Since then the rebuy-de team has taken up interest in responding to their issues and pull requests, however there are a lot of outstanding feature requests and other tasks not being tackled, therefore I have decided to continue maintaining this fork as I have a few things I want to do with it that I don't think they will be interested.

Continued Attribution

I want to make it clear that I am not trying to take credit for the work of the original authors, and I will continue to give them credit for their work. I also want to make sure any contributors are also recognized and attributed for their work. Since this has diverged from the upstream, I've written tooling and scripts to cherry-pick commits from upstream and apply them to this fork, then modify the resources to work with the new library and submit as a PR to this fork.

Introducing libnuke

Officially over the Christmas break of 2023, I decided to create libnuke which is a library that can be used to create similar tools for other cloud providers. This library is used by both this tool, aws-nuke, and azure-nuke and soon gcp-nuke.

I also needed a version of this tool for Azure and GCP, and initially I just copied and altered the code I needed for Azure, but I didn't want to have to maintain multiple copies of the same code, so I decided to create libnuke to abstract all the code that was common between the two tools and write proper unit tests for it.

Why a rewrite?

I decided to rewrite this tool for a few reasons:

  • [x] I wanted to improve the build process by using goreleaser
  • [x] I wanted to improve the release process by using goreleaser and publishing multi-architecture images
  • [x] I also wanted to start signing all the releases
  • [x] I wanted to add additional tests and improve the test coverage, more tests on the way for individual resources.
    • libnuke is at 94%+ overall test coverage.
  • [x] I wanted to reduce the maintenance burden by abstracting the core code into a library
  • [x] I wanted to make adding additional resources more easy and lowering the barrier to entry
  • [x] I wanted to add a lot more documentation and examples
  • [x] I wanted to take steps to make way for AWS SDK Version 2
  • [ ] I wanted to add a DAG for dependencies between resource types and individual resources (this is still a work in progress)
    • This will improve the process of deleting resources that have dependencies on other resources and reduce errors and unnecessary API calls.