Delete All Messages in an Amazon SQS Queue via AWS CLI

Amazon SQS or Simple Queue Service is a fast, reliable, scalable, fully managed message queuing service. There is also AWS CLI or Command Line Interface available to use with the service.

If you have a lot of messages in a queue, this command will show the approximate number:

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$ aws sqs get-queue-attributes \
  --queue-url $url \
  --attribute-names ApproximateNumberOfMessages

Where $url is the URL to the Amazon SQS queue.

There is no command to delete all messages yet, but you can chain a few commands together to make it work:

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$ while true; do \
    aws sqs receive-message --queue-url $url --max-number-of-messages 10 \
    | jq -c -M \ 
    '.Messages[] | "Id=" + .MessageId + ",ReceiptHandle=" + .ReceiptHandle' \
    | xargs aws sqs delete-message-batch --queue-url $url --entries || break; \
  done

Amazon SQS allows you to receive up to 10 messages at most, so you have to loop through it. The default response of the receive-message command is in JSON, hence using jq to process the result and extract just what we need for deletion: MessageId and ReceiptHandle.

If there are no more messages, you will likely get the following error:

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list index out of range
xargs: aws: exited with status 255; aborting

Then you exit the loop.

With the network latency and limitation of 10 messages at a batch, this is pretty slow. But you can run multiple commands to speed up the deletion process. Or take the shortcut with a faster way: delete the entire queue and then recreate it.