Auto-filling AWS delete text with tsmash browser extension

You know what really grinds my gears? A small, inconsistent feature of the AWS management console that requires you to input “delete” or “delete me” or the resource name whenever you delete something like an s3 bucket or an sns topic etc.

Why AWS, why is it like this? Can we just stick with delete or toggle this setting account wide to remove the need for it?

Anyway, this bugged me to the point that I created a small opensource browser extension named tsmash. In usual talkncloud style the code is available in the github repo and can be found here:

talkncloud/tsmash

autofill aws input box when deleting items such as s3, dynamodb, sns etc - talkncloud/tsmash

talkncloud GitHub

Why?

What I found was that when I was testing a new Infrastructure as Code (IaC) stack or just testing something manually, I would go through cleanup and have to constantly fill in all of these varying inputs. As with most developers, the use of buckets, NoSQL and notifications is pretty common and retaining those in automated deployments is also common so they are often left behind when you delete the stack.

As an alternate to the AWS management console in the browser you could always use the cli as workaround to this. The browser is pretty convenient though.

Browser support

I’ve developed support for both Firefox and Chrome, sorry Microsoft users I haven’t tested or published to edge just yet. If you would like this for edge please reach out and I’ll see what I can do. Direct links to Firefox and Chrome:

Firefox

Chrome

bUt WhAt aBoUt PrOd?

OK, I can hear the more risk adverse users among us thinking “I wouldn’t mind having to input the bucket name in my production account or customer account” for example.

I have included a small configuration option to list out account id’s that you’d like to exclude from the extension. This basically means the default AWS input will need to be manually entered.

Feedback

I am curious to hear what others think about this, I am expecting to catch a little flack over this as it does remove a safety check before removing something. But, for me it feels a bit like training wheels. haha. Anyway, hope it helps someone, let me know what you think.