Best way to delete messages from SQS during development

Question

During development, I'm generating a lot of bogus messages on my Amazon SQS. I was about to write a tiny app to delete all the messages (something I do frequently during development). Does anyone know of a tool to purge the queue?

Answer 1

If you don't want to write script or delete your queue. You can change the queue configuration:

1. Right click on queue > configure queue
2. Change Message Retention period to 1 minute (the minimum time it can be set to).
3. Wait a while for all the messages to disappear.

I found that this way works well for deleting all messages in a queue without deleting the queue.

Answer 2

As of December 2014, the sqs console now has a purge queue option in the queue actions menu.

Answer 3

For anyone who has come here, looking for a way to delete SQS messages en masse in C#...

//C# Console app which deletes all messages from a specified queue
//AWS .NET library required.

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;

using Amazon;
using Amazon.SQS;
using Amazon.SQS.Model;
using System.Timers;

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace QueueDeleter
{
    class Program
    {
        public static System.Timers.Timer myTimer;
        static NameValueCollection appConfig = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings;
        static string accessKeyID = appConfig["AWSAccessKey"];
        static string secretAccessKeyID = appConfig["AWSSecretKey"];
        static private AmazonSQS sqs;

        static string myQueueUrl = "https://queue.amazonaws.com/1640634564530223/myQueueUrl";
        public static String messageReceiptHandle;

        public static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            sqs = AWSClientFactory.CreateAmazonSQSClient(accessKeyID, secretAccessKeyID);

            myTimer = new System.Timers.Timer();
            myTimer.Interval = 10;
            myTimer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(checkQueue);
            myTimer.AutoReset = true;
            myTimer.Start();
            Console.Read();
        }

        static void checkQueue(object source, ElapsedEventArgs e)
        {
            myTimer.Stop();

            ReceiveMessageRequest receiveMessageRequest = new ReceiveMessageRequest();
            receiveMessageRequest.QueueUrl = myQueueUrl;
            ReceiveMessageResponse receiveMessageResponse = sqs.ReceiveMessage(receiveMessageRequest);
            if (receiveMessageResponse.IsSetReceiveMessageResult())
            {
                ReceiveMessageResult receiveMessageResult = receiveMessageResponse.ReceiveMessageResult;

                if (receiveMessageResult.Message.Count < 1)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Can't find any visible messages.");
                    myTimer.Start();
                    return;
                }

            foreach (Message message in receiveMessageResult.Message)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Printing received message.\n");

                messageReceiptHandle = message.ReceiptHandle;

                Console.WriteLine("Message Body:");
                if (message.IsSetBody())
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("    Body: {0}", message.Body);
                }
                sqs.DeleteMessage(new DeleteMessageRequest().WithQueueUrl(myQueueUrl).WithReceiptHandle(messageReceiptHandle));
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("No new messages.");
        }

         myTimer.Start();
        }
    }
}

Answer 4

Check the first item in queue. Scroll down to last item in queue. Hold shift, click on item. All will be selected.

Answer 5

I think the best way would be to delete the queue and create it again, just 2 requests.

Answer 6

I think best way is changing Retention period to 1 minute, but here is Python code if someone needs:

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import boto.sqs
from boto.sqs.message import Message
import time
import os

startTime = program_start_time = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", time.gmtime())

### Lets connect to SQS:
qcon = boto.sqs.connect_to_region(region,aws_access_key_id='xxx',aws_secret_access_key='xxx')
SHQueue = qcon.get_queue('SQS')
m = Message()
### Read file and write to SQS
counter = 0
while counter < 1000:   ## For deleting 1000*10 items, change to True if you want delete all
    links = SHQueue.get_messages(10)
    for link in links:
            m = link
            SHQueue.delete_message(m)
    counter += 1
#### The End
print "\n\nTerminating...\n"
print "Start: ", program_start_time
print "End time: ", time.strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S", time.gmtime())

Answer 7

Option 1: boto sqs has a purge_queue method for python:

purge_queue(queue)
Purge all messages in an SQS Queue.

Parameters: queue (A Queue object) – The SQS queue to be purged
Return type:    bool
Returns:    True if the command succeeded, False otherwise

Source: http://boto.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ref/sqs.html

Code that works for me:

conn = boto.sqs.connect_to_region('us-east-1',
          aws_access_key_id=AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID,
          aws_secret_access_key=AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY,
)
q = conn.create_queue("blah")
#add some messages here

#invoke the purge_queue method of the conn, and pass in the
#queue to purge.
conn.purge_queue(self.queue)

For me, it deleted the queue. However, Amazon SQS only lets you run this once every 60 seconds. So I had to use the secondary solution below:

Option 2: Do a purge by consuming all messages in a while loop and throwing them out:

    all_messages = []
    rs = self.queue.get_messages(10)
    while len(rs) > 0:
        all_messages.extend(rs)
        rs = self.queue.get_messages(10)

Answer 8

If you have access to the AWS console, you can purge a queue using the Web UI.

Steps:

• Navigate to Services -> SQS
• Filter queues by your "QUEUE_NAME"
• Right-click on your queue name -> Purge queue

This will request for the queue to be cleared and this should be completed with 5 or 10 seconds or so.

See below for how to perform this operation:

Answer 9

To purge an SQS from the API see:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSimpleQueueService/latest/APIReference/API_PurgeQueue.html