aws-melt

A tool for cleaning up AWS Glacier vaults by retrieving inventories and deleting archives.

Overview

aws-melt automates the process of:

1. Retrieving inventory from Glacier vaults
2. Waiting for inventory jobs to complete
3. Downloading inventory data
4. Deleting all archives in the vaults

Note that aws-melt does not delete the vaults themselves, only the archives within it. The vaults need to be deleted by hand. (The reason is that AWS does not allow any activity to the vault within a few hours of touching it.)

Prerequisites

• Ruby
• jq
• AWS CLI configured with appropriate credentials
• Environment variables:
  • AWS_ACCOUNT_ID
  • AWS_DEFAULT_REGION

Installation

git clone https://github.com/thomergil/aws-melt
# brew install jq
# or
# apt-get install jq
cd aws-melt
chmod +x aws-melt

Usage

List of vaults

You can create vaults.txt using the AWS CLI:

export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID="your-account-id"
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="your-region"
aws glacier list-vaults --account-id $AWS_ACCOUNT_ID --region $AWS_DEFAULT_REGION | jq -r '.VaultList[].VaultName'

Then remove any vaults from vaults.txt you do not want to delete.

vaults.txt needs to contain one vault name per line, for example:

myvault1
myvault2_backup
another_vault

!!Any vault that remains in vault.txt will be destroyed!!

Basic usage

export AWS_ACCOUNT_ID="your-account-id"
export AWS_DEFAULT_REGION="your-region"
./aws-melt

Options

./aws-melt --delete-only  # Skip inventory retrieval, process existing JSON files
./aws-melt --verbose      # Show detailed AWS command output

The --delete-only option allows you to restart the deletion process using existing inventory JSON files if the process was interrupted.

The --verbose option shows the output of AWS CLI commands, which can be helpful for debugging.

How it works

1. Reads vault names from vaults.txt
2. For each vault:
   • Initiates an inventory-retrieval job
   • Monitors job completion (checking every hour)
   • Downloads inventory when ready
   • Deletes all archives listed in the inventory
3. Creates JSON files named: {vaultname}_{jobid}_{timestamp}.json

Notes

• Glacier inventory retrieval typically takes 3-5 hours
• Archive deletion is performed one archive at a time
• Large vaults with many archives may take significant time to process
• aws-melt will delete all archives and then the vaults themselves
• Use --verbose if you need to see detailed command output for troubleshooting

License

MIT