Deleting a stack - Amazon CloudFormation
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Deleting a stack

To delete a stack, you run the aws cloudformation delete-stack command. You must specify the name of the stack that you want to delete. When you delete a stack, you delete the stack and all its resources.

The following example deletes the myteststack stack:

$ aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name myteststack
Note

You can't delete a stack that has termination protection enabled. For more information, see Protecting a stack from being deleted

If the deletion fails and returns a DELETE_FAILED state, you can choose to delete the stack by force using the deletion-mode parameter. These are the following values that can be used with deletion-mode:

  • STANDARD: Deletes the stack normally. This is the default deletion mode.

  • FORCE_DELETE_STACK: Deletes the stack and skips all resources that are failing to delete.

The following example force deletes the myteststack stack using the FORCE_DELETE_STACK value with the deletion-mode parameter:

$ aws cloudformation delete-stack --stack-name myteststack \
    --deletion-mode FORCE_DELETE_STACK

When using FORCE_DELETE_STACK, you may retain resources even if you have deleted the stack. The following example shows the resources for the deleted stack: 

$ aws cloudformation list-stack-resources --stack-name myteststack

The retained resources will show a DELETE_SKIPPED status.

For more information on listing resources associated with a stack, see Listing resources