forest-fire

This is a little command-line tool with an ill-advised name, to easily tear down CloudFormation stacks which have outputs that other stacks depend on. In the AWS Console this is rather annoying, since you have to manually chase up dependencies.

This tool simply interrogates the aws-cli tool about the stack you're trying to delete, finds out its outputs, and checks whether any currently-active stacks are importing them. The output is a dependency tree, which trivially tells us the order of deletion for it to succeed. If you're feeling adventurous, you may also let forest-fire do the actual deletion for you.

Installation

Prerequisites

You'll need the following installed and available to be able to use this software:

Haskell Stack

You'll want to install Stack using your local package manager (yes, it's available on Homebrew as haskell-stack), or if you're adventurous, using their curl | bash method...

You'll need to add ~/.local/bin to your $PATH.

AWS CLI interface

I'm guessing that this is a thing you'll already have.

Instructions

To download and install the utility, simply run:

stack install forest-fire

Usage

If you simply run the tool without arguments, it'll print usage information. Here's the down-low, however.

Find out what depends on a stack

Note that this performs a dry run (read-only). The dependency tree will be printed, along with the order in which you'd have to perform deletions, but nothing will be executed.

forest-fire "kubernetes-dynamic-91acf0ef-lifecycle"

Perform the deletions if you're satisfied with the tree

forest-fire "kubernetes-dynamic-91acf0ef-lifecycle" --delete

Credits

Thanks Redbubble, i totally should've been doing other things instead of shaving this yak.