I’ve been working on a lambda service that will place users into groups based on their IdP (identity provider). I’ve recently had a feature request to place users into specific groups within the UP (user pool) based on a list of groups within an attribute received from the IdP.

We utilize a UP for our testing/dev environments and to test this new feature I wanted to remove all the current users within the UP. Using the AWS Cognito Console is rather cumbersome, especially if you’re wanting to remove multiple users.

Using the AWS-CLI, you can easily remove a single user if you have the UP ID and the username of the account you want to remove. I need to remove about 15 accounts though. Here’s what I came up with…

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USERPOOLID=__USERPOOLID__; \
for u in $(aws --profile dev cognito-idp list-users --user-pool $USERPOOLID | jq -r '.Users[].Username'); \
do aws --profile dev cognito-idp admin-delete-user --user-pool-id $USERPOOLID --username $u; \
done

__USERPOOLID__ - Change to the ID for the UP you want to remove the users from.

–profile prod - Change this to match the AWS profile for the environment you’re targeting.

jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. You’ll need to get it for this solution to work.