Export Route 53 Hosted Zone DNS Records to a File in Bulk to a Local Machine and Export Them to a New AWS Account

With AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) & the CLI53 Tool

Photo by John Simmons on Unsplash

To export DNS records from an existing Route 53 hosted zone to a file and then import them into a new account, we can use the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) and the cli53 tool. Here are the general steps:

Export DNS Records:

1. Install the cli53 tool. We can install it using “pip” or “brew”:

pip install cli53 or brew install cli53

2. Export DNS records from the old Route 53 hosted zone:
   cli53 export — full old-domain.com > my-dns-records-export.txt

Replace old-domain.com with your actual domain.

3. The “my-dns-records-export.txt” file now contains the exported DNS records. To verify run;

cat my-dns-records-export.txt

Photo by Ray Harrington on Unsplash

Import DNS Records:

1. Install the AWS CLI on your new machine if you haven’t already.

2. Configure the AWS CLI with credentials for the new AWS account:
   aws configure (then provide access keys and region details)

3. Import DNS records into the new Route 53 hosted zone:
   cli53 import — file dns-export.txt — replace — merge new-domain.com
   OR
   cli53 import — file aa-dns-export.txt — replace — upsert domain.com

OR

cli53 import — file my-dns-records-export2.txt — replace domain.com

OR

cli53 import — file my-dns-records-export2.txt — upsert domain.com

Replace new-domain.com with your actual domain.

The — replace option will replace all existing records in the hosted zone with the records from the file.

The — merge option will add new records and update existing ones without deleting any records.

Ensure that the IAM user or role used by the AWS CLI has the appropriate permissions for the Route 53 actions (route53:ChangeResourceRecordSets, route53:ListResourceRecordSets, etc.).