Recently I came across the problem of how to wipe a dynamodb table. I though there would be an ui button for this or at lease an api/sdk method but from what I found the only way it to individually delete the items by key. This method can be batched up to 10 items per call but is still very slow and incurs write costs.

Since I’m used Terraform to create the table in the first place I thought I’ll just destroy it and remake it… Then came the problem of not wanting to destroy everything but simply remake the table. After some digging in Terraform docs I found a pretty clean solution.

main.tf

module "dynamodb_table" {
  source   = "terraform-aws-modules/dynamodb-table/aws"

  name     = "poverty-line-county-gps-map"
  hash_key = "id"
  stream_enabled = false

  attributes = [
    {
      name = "id"
      type = "S"
    }
  ]

  tags = {
    Terraform   = "true"
    Project = "poverty_line"
  }
}

In this case I wanted to remake “poverty-line-county-gps-map”. To find out what exactly it is called I ran terraform state:

$ terraform state list
aws_sqs_queue.dead_letter_queue
aws_sqs_queue.terraform_queue
module.dynamodb_table.aws_dynamodb_table.this[0]

from here the resource can be remake like:

$ terraform apply -replace="module.dynamodb_table.aws_dynamodb_table.this[0]"

Happy times remaking things. 👋