Provision Route53 DNS Records with the AWS CLI

Update, i’m still dedicated to doing as much as I can through the AWS CLI. I’ve learned a ton this way and it’s given me better insight into what’s possible with different aws services. Learned a ton about using sed as well. Even though the find/replace in vim is nearly identical to sed it took me a few hours of reading the docs and stackoverflow posts about the syntax for regular expressions to really get the hang of it. While sed’s an awesome tool to know, next time I think I want to try a command line tool that can interact with serialized data more easily. Like everything my writing style is still a work in progress so I’ll probably go back and change things around when I’ve found something I vibe with.

Note: This process follows the creation of an A record and assumes the public IP to be associated is already known

Get Hosted Zone ID

This command searches for hosted zones based on name. e.g. bigkea.com, Output is the hosted zone id.

dname="<zone-name>" \
aws route53 list-hosted-zones-by-name --output=text | grep $dname | sed -n "s/^.*zone\/\(\S*\).*$/\1/p"

Get the CLI Skeleton

Write some yaml for the request.

aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --generate-cli-skeleton yaml-input > change-record.yaml

That gives us the skeleton. I changed the Action: to UPSERT (updates record if record exists/inserts new record if record doesn’t exist), Name: to jenkins.bigkea.com, Type: to A, and Value: to my public IP. I deleted unused lines so if you were making a cname record, you would change value to CNAME and fill out the cname specific lines using an original skeleton.

HostedZoneId: '<zone-id>'  # [REQUIRED] The ID of the hosted zone that contains the resource record sets that you want to change.
ChangeBatch: # [REQUIRED] A complex type that contains an optional comment and the Changes element.
  Comment: ''  #  Optional.
  Changes: # [REQUIRED] Information about the changes to make to the record sets.
  - Action: UPSERT # [REQUIRED] The action to perform. Valid values are: CREATE, DELETE, UPSERT.
    ResourceRecordSet: # [REQUIRED] Information about the resource record set to create, delete, or update.
      Name: 'jenkins.bigkea.com'  # [REQUIRED] For ChangeResourceRecordSets requests, the name of the record that you want to create, update, or delete.
      Type: A # [REQUIRED] The DNS record type. Valid values are: SOA, A, TXT, NS, CNAME, MX, NAPTR, PTR, SRV, SPF, AAAA, CAA, DS.
      TTL: 0 # The resource record cache time to live (TTL), in seconds.
      ResourceRecords: # Information about the resource records to act upon.
      - Value: '<public-ip>'  # [REQUIRED] The current or new DNS record value, not to exceed 4,000 characters.

Issue the Command

Now finally make the request.

aws route53 change-resource-record-sets --cli-input-yaml file://record-set.yaml

You can confirm the record set was created with:

aws route53 list-resource-record-sets --hosted-zone-id <zone-id>