cloud-nuke

This repo contains a CLI tool to delete all resources in an AWS account. cloud-nuke was created for situations when you might have an account you use for testing and need to clean up leftover resources so you're not charged for them. Also great for cleaning out accounts with redundant resources. Also great for removing unnecessary defaults like default VPCs and permissive ingress/egress rules in default security groups.

The currently supported functionality includes:

AWS

• Deleting all ACM Private CA in an AWS account
• Deleting all Auto scaling groups in an AWS account
• Deleting all Elastic Load Balancers (Classic and V2) in an AWS account
• Deleting all Transit Gateways in an AWS account
• Deleting all EBS Volumes in an AWS account
• Deleting all unprotected EC2 instances in an AWS account
• Deleting all AMIs in an AWS account
• Deleting all Snapshots in an AWS account
• Deleting all Elastic IPs in an AWS account
• Deleting all Launch Configurations in an AWS account
• Deleting all ECS services in an AWS account
• Deleting all ECS clusters in an AWS account
• Deleting all EKS clusters in an AWS account
• Deleting all RDS DB instances in an AWS account
• Deleting all Lambda Functions in an AWS account
• Deleting all SQS queues in an AWS account
• Deleting all S3 buckets in an AWS account - except for buckets tagged with Key=cloud-nuke-excluded Value=true
• Deleting all default VPCs in an AWS account
• Deleting VPCs in an AWS Account (except for default VPCs which is handled by the dedicated defaults-aws subcommand)
• Deleting all IAM users in an AWS account
• Deleting all Secrets Manager Secrets in an AWS account
• Deleting all NAT Gateways in an AWS account
• Deleting all IAM Access Analyzers in an AWS account
• Revoking the default rules in the un-deletable default security group of a VPC
• Deleting all DynamoDB tables in an AWS account
• Deleting all CloudWatch Dashboards in an AWS account
• Deleting all OpenSearch Domains in an AWS account

BEWARE!

When executed as cloud-nuke aws, this tool is HIGHLY DESTRUCTIVE and deletes all resources! This mode should never be used in a production environment!

When executed as cloud-nuke defaults-aws, this tool deletes all DEFAULT VPCs and the default ingress/egress rule for all default security groups. This should be used in production environments WITH CAUTION.

Install

Download from releases page

1. Download the latest binary for your OS on the releases page.
2. Move the binary to a folder on your PATH. E.g.: mv cloud-nuke_darwin_amd64 /usr/local/bin/cloud-nuke.
3. Add execute permissions to the binary. E.g.: chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/cloud-nuke.
4. Test it installed correctly: cloud-nuke --help.

Install via package manager

Note that package managers are third party. The third party cloud-nuke packages may not be updated with the latest version, but are often close. Please check your version against the latest available on the releases page. If you want the latest version, the recommended installation option is to download from the releases page.

• macOS: You can install cloud-nuke using Homebrew: brew install cloud-nuke.

• Linux: Most Linux users can use Homebrew: brew install cloud-nuke.

Usage

Simply running cloud-nuke aws will start the process of cleaning up your cloud account. You'll be shown a list of resources that'll be deleted as well as a prompt to confirm before any deletion actually takes place.

In AWS, to delete only the default resources, run cloud-nuke defaults-aws. This will remove the default VPCs in each region, and will also revoke the ingress and egress rules associated with the default security group in each VPC. Note that the default security group itself is unable to be deleted.

Nuke resources in certain regions

When using cloud-nuke aws, you can use the --region flag to target resources in certain regions for deletion. For example the following command will nuke resources only in ap-south-1 and ap-south-2 regions:

cloud-nuke aws --region ap-south-1 --region ap-south-2

Including regions is available within both cloud-nuke aws and with cloud-nuke defaults-aws.

Exclude resources in certain regions

When using cloud-nuke aws, you can use the --exclude-region flag to exclude resources in certain regions from being deleted. For example the following command does not nuke resources in ap-south-1 and ap-south-2 regions:

cloud-nuke aws --exclude-region ap-south-1 --exclude-region ap-south-2

--region and --exclude-region flags cannot be specified together i.e. they are mutually exclusive.

Excluding regions is available within both cloud-nuke aws and with cloud-nuke defaults-aws.

Excluding Resources by Age

You can use the --older-than flag to only nuke resources that were created before a certain period, the possible values are all valid values for ParseDuration For example the following command nukes resources that are at least one day old:

cloud-nuke aws --older-than 24h

List supported resource types

You can use the --list-resource-types flag to list resource types whose termination is currently supported:

cloud-nuke aws --list-resource-types

Terminate specific resource types

If you want to target specific resource types (e.g ec2, ami, etc.) instead of all the supported resources you can do so by specifying them through the --resource-type flag:

cloud-nuke aws --resource-type ec2 --resource-type ami

will search and target only ec2 and ami resources. The specified resource type should be a valid resource type i.e. it should be present in the --list-resource-types output. Using --resource-type also speeds up search because we are searching only for specific resource types.

Exclude terminating specific resource types

Just like you can select which resources to terminate using --resource-type, you can select which resources to skip using --exclude-resource-type flag:

cloud-nuke aws --exclude-resource-type s3 --exclude-resource-type ec2

This will terminate all resource types other than S3 and EC2.

--resource-type and --exclude-resource-type flags cannot be specified together i.e. they are mutually exclusive.

Dry run mode

If you want to check what resources are going to be targeted without actually terminating them, you can use the --dry-run flag

cloud-nuke aws --resource-type ec2 --dry-run

Config file

For more granularity, such as being able to specify which resources to terminate using regular expressions or plain text, you can pass in a configuration file.

Note: Config file support is a new feature and only filtering a handful of resources by name using regular expressions is currently supported. We'll be adding more support in the future, and pull requests are welcome!

The following resources support the Config file:

• S3 Buckets
  • Resource type: s3
  • Config key: s3
• IAM Users
  • Resource type: iam
  • Config key: IAMUsers
• Secrets Manager Secrets
  • Resource type: secretsmanager
  • Config key: SecretsManager
• NAT Gateways
  • Resource type: nat-gateway
  • Config key: NATGateway
• IAM Access Analyzers
  • Resource type: accessanalyzer
  • Config key: AccessAnalyzer
• CloudWatch Dashboards
  • Resource type: cloudwatch-dashboard
  • Config key: CloudWatchDashboard
• OpenSearch Domains
  • Resource type: opensearch
  • Config key: OpenSearchDomain

Example

cloud-nuke aws --resource-type s3 --config path/to/file.yaml

Given this command, cloud-nuke will nuke only S3 buckets, as specified by the --resource-type s3 option.

Now given the following config, the s3 buckets that will be nuked are further filtered to only include ones that match any of the provided regular expressions. So a bucket named alb-app-access-logs would be deleted, but a bucket named my-s3-bucket would not.

s3:
  include:
    names_regex:
      - ^alb-.*-access-logs$
      - .*-prod-alb-.*

Similarly, you can adjust the config to delete only IAM users of a particular name by using the IAMUsers key. For example, in the following config, only IAM users that have the prefix my-test-user- in their username will be deleted.

IAMUsers:
  include:
    names_regex:
      - ^my-test-user-.*

Include and exclude together

Now consider the following contrived example:

s3:
  include:
    names_regex:
      - ^alb-.*-access-logs$
      - .*-prod-alb-.*
  exclude:
    names_regex:
      - public
      - prod

The intention is to delete all the s3 buckets that match the include rules but not the exclude rules. Filtering is commutative, meaning that you should get the same result whether you apply the include filters before or after the exclude filters.

The result of these filters applied in either order will be a set of s3 buckets that match ^alb-.*-access-logs$ as long as they do not also contain public or prod. The rule to include s3 buckets matching .*-prod-alb-.* is negated by the rule to exclude those matching prod.

CLI options override config file options

The options provided in the command line take precedence over those provided in any config file that gets passed in. For example, say you provide --resource-type s3 in the command line, along with a config file that specifies ec2: at the top level but doesn't specify s3:. The command line argument filters the resource types to include only s3, so the rules in the config file for ec2: are ignored, and ec2 resources are not nuked. All s3 resources would be nuked.

In the same vein, say you do not provide a --resource-type option in the command line, but you do pass in a config file that only lists rules for s3:, such as cloud-nuke aws --config path/to/config.yaml. In this case all resources would be nuked, but among s3 buckets, only those matching your config file rules would be nuked.

Be careful when nuking and append the --dry-run option if you're unsure. Even without --dry-run, cloud-nuke will list resources that would undergo nuking and wait for your confirmation before carrying it out.

What's supported?

To find out what we options are supported in the config file today, consult this table. Resource types at the top level of the file that are supported are listed here.

resource type	names	names_regex	tags	tags_regex
s3	none	✅	none	none
iam	none	✅	none	none
secretsmanager	none	✅	none	none
nat-gateway	none	✅	none	none
accessanalyzer	none	✅	none	none
acmpca	none	none	none	none
ec2 instance	none	none	none	none
iam role	none	none	none	none
... (more to come)	none	none	none	none

Log level

You can set the log level by specifying the --log-level flag as per logrus log levels:

cloud-nuke aws --log-level debug

OR

LOG_LEVEL=debug cloud-nuke aws

Default value is - info. Acceptable values are debug, info, warn, error, panic, fatal, trace as per logrus log level parser.

Nuking only default security group rules

When deleting defaults with cloud-nuke defaults-aws, use the --sg-only flag to delete only the default security group rules and not the default VPCs.

cloud-nuke defaults-aws --sg-only

Happy Nuking!!!

Credentials

AWS

In order for the cloud-nuke CLI tool to access your AWS, you will need to provide your AWS credentials. You can use one of the standard AWS CLI credential mechanisms.

Running Tests

go test -v ./...

Contributing

cloud-nuke is an open source project, and contributions from the community are very welcome! Please check out the Contribution Guidelines and Developing cloud-nuke for instructions.

Developing cloud-nuke

Running Locally

To run cloud-nuke locally, use the go run command:

go run main.go

Running tests

Note: Many of the tests in the aws folder run against a real AWS account and will create and destroy actual resources. DO NOT hit CTRL+C while the tests are running, as this will prevent them from cleaning up properly. We are not responsible for any charges you may incur.

Before running the tests, you must configure your AWS credentials.

To run all the tests:

go test -v ./...

To run only the tests in a specific package, such as the package aws:

cd aws
go test -v

And to run a specific test, such as TestListAMIs in package aws:

cd aws
go test -v -run TestListAMIs

Use env-vars to opt-in to special tests, which are expensive to run:

# Run acmpca tests
TEST_ACMPCA_EXPENSIVE_ENABLE=1 go test -v ./...

Formatting

Every source file in this project should be formatted with go fmt.

Releasing new versions

We try to follow the release process as deifned in our Coding Methodology.

Choosing a new release tag

If the new release contains any new resources that cloud-nuke will support, mark it as a minor version bump (X in v0.X.Y) to indicate backward incompatibilities.

This is because since version v0.2.0 cloud-nuke has been configured to include automatically new resources (opt-out vs opt-in), which is inherently not backwards compatible. As such, we have decided to mark the addition of new nuked resources as backward incompatible to provide better signals for users when we introduce a new resource.

To release a new version

Go to the Releases Page and create a new release. The CircleCI job for this repo has been configured to:

1. Automatically detect new tags.
2. Build binaries for every OS using that tag as a version number.
3. Upload the binaries to the release in GitHub.

See .circleci/config.yml for details.

License

This code is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt.