Best way to delete messages from SQS during development

Question

During development, I'm generating a lot of bogus messages on my Amazon SQS. I was about to write a tiny app to delete all the messages (something I do frequently during development). Does anyone know of a tool to purge the queue?

Answer 1

If you don't want to write script or delete your queue. You can change the queue configuration:

1. Right click on queue > configure queue
2. Change Message Retention period to 1 minute (the minimum time it can be set to).
3. Wait a while for all the messages to disappear.

I found that this way works well for deleting all messages in a queue without deleting the queue.

Answer 2

As of December 2014, the sqs console now has a purge queue option in the queue actions menu.