Best way to delete messages from SQS during development - amazon-sqs

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:
Right click on queue > configure queue
Change Message Retention period to 1 minute (the minimum time it can be set to).
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