Delete all CloudSearch documents in a given domain

delete-all-cloudsearch-documents.sh

#!/bin/bash

# This script will delete *all* documents in a CloudSearch domain.
# USE WITH EXTREME CAUTION

# Note: depends on the AWS CLI SDK being installed, as well as jq
# For jq, see: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ and https://jqplay.org/

if [[ ! $# -eq 2 || $1 != "--doc-domain" || ! $2 =~ ^https://.*$ ]]; then
   echo "Must define --doc-domain argument (e.g. --doc-domain https://somedomain.aws.com)";
   exit 1;
fi

CS_DOMAIN=$2
TMP_DELETE_FILE=/tmp/delete-all-cloudsearch-documents.json
TMP_RESULTS_FILE=/tmp/delete-all-cloudsearch-documents-tmp-results.json

while [ 1 -eq 1 ]; do
   aws cloudsearchdomain search \
      --endpoint-url=$CS_DOMAIN \
      --size=10000 \
      --query-parser=structured \
      --search-query="matchall" > ${TMP_RESULTS_FILE}

   cat ${TMP_RESULTS_FILE} | jq '[.hits.hit[] | {type: "delete", id: .id}]' > ${TMP_DELETE_FILE}

   CNT_TOTAL=$(cat ${TMP_RESULTS_FILE} | jq '.hits.found')
   CNT_DOCS=$(cat ${TMP_DELETE_FILE} | jq '. | length')

   if [[ $CNT_DOCS -gt 0 ]]; then
      echo "About to delete ${CNT_DOCS} documents of ${CNT_TOTAL} total in index"

      aws cloudsearchdomain upload-documents \
         --endpoint-url=$CS_DOMAIN \
         --content-type='application/json' \
         --documents=${TMP_DELETE_FILE}
   else
      echo "No more docs to delete"
      exit 0
   fi
done

@winzig were the documents actually deleted in your case? The loop in the code should have found 0 documents at the second iteration and stopped.

I found this thread while diagnosing aws cloudsearchdomain upload-documents, which for me reports successfully deleting 10000 documents but doesn't actually do so. This seems consistent with your output as the documents are not being deleted so the loop keeps going.

worked like a charm. thank you so much 👍

I tried the script (only the search part) but it did not work, because the result file was not in Json format. It says "Invalid numeric literal at line 1, column 5". And the file starts with:

HITS    8581    0
HIT     b187f653b61b08e5ee5f54c662b280e4ad368f5c1d631e32ce3b2cbf31c81ae4ba4b39360fc859fa364da32788549a5543fd4efb734f12438e3a4b4238bc5212
BOOK    Studio ASDoc
BOOST   0.029440219

So, how do I get Cloudsearch to deliver a JSON file as the response?

@mafritsch did you try aws help and set the --output json option?

@jthomerson Thank you very much. --output json was the missing option!

Thanks so much for making and publishing this script. Very helpful! In my case I added a filter query to target specific data.

I am deleting millions of records and am finding that it stops periodically, saying there are no more records to delete. I haven't researched the cause yet, but suspect it's an "eventual consistency" issue, thinking the same record ids are being returned that were just deleted. Was wondering if paginating the results with a cursor might help.

I am deleting millions of records and am finding that it stops periodically, saying there are no more records to delete.

Results looked like:

    "hits": {
        "found": 9803889,
        "start": 0,
        "hit": [ ]

(no records listed in the hit list)

I found that adding a random sort really helped (--sort="_rand asc"). There may be a better solution, but this was an easy change that helped in my case.