Backing Up Route53 Records

In this post, we’ll see how can we take a dump of Route53 records. This can be useful in migration scenarios where you need to change DNS entries for a lot of URLs and you want to take a backup of original entries.

Pre-requisite: You need to have a Route53 zone with some DNS entries.

Step 1: Create a policy with the following IAM permission.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "route53:ListResourceRecordSets",
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Step 2: Create an IAM user with programmatic access and attach the policy created earlier to it. You need to set up AWS CLI using this user’s credentials.

Step 3: Copy the following code and save it on your local system. Specify the zone id of your Route53 hosted zone which you need to take backup of.

import boto3

zone_id=''
client = boto3.client('route53')
paginator = client.get_paginator('list_resource_record_sets')

try:
    source_zone_records = paginator.paginate(HostedZoneId=zone_id)
    for record_set in source_zone_records:
        for record in record_set['ResourceRecordSets']:
            if record['Type'] in ['A','CNAME']:
                if 'AliasTarget' in record:
                    print (record['Name']+','+record['Type']+','+record['AliasTarget']['DNSName'])
                else:
                    records=[]
                    for ip in record['ResourceRecords']:
                        records.append(ip['Value'])
                    print (record['Name']+','+record['Type']+','+','.join(records))
except Exception as error:
	print(record)
	print ('An error occured getting source zone records '+ str(error))
	exit(1)

Step 4: Execute the script and save the output to a text file.

That’s all. Now you can make changes to your DNS records and revert them to original values in case something goes wrong.