When working with AWS Glue, triggers are an important mechanism to orchestrate jobs or workflows. Sometimes, however, you may need to temporarily disable a trigger without deleting it—for example, to pause scheduled ingestions during maintenance or testing. This article explains how to disable a trigger using the AWS CLI.

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Understanding AWS Glue Triggers

AWS Glue supports different types of triggers:

• On-demand triggers: started manually.
• Event-based triggers: started when specific conditions are met.
• Scheduled triggers: run at predefined times (e.g., daily at 12:00 PM).

Each trigger can be in one of the following states:

• ACTIVATED: enabled and will execute as scheduled or when conditions are met.
• DEACTIVATED: disabled and will not run until re-enabled.

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The Problem

A common mistake is attempting to disable a trigger using:

aws glue update-trigger --name my-trigger --trigger-update '{"State": "DISABLED"}'

This fails because State is not a valid parameter in update-trigger. Instead, AWS Glue provides explicit commands to start or stop triggers.

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The Correct Way to Disable a Trigger

To disable (stop) a trigger:

aws glue stop-trigger --name sales-data-trigger

This will change the trigger state from ACTIVATED to DEACTIVATED, preventing it from firing until re-enabled.

To re-enable (start) the trigger:

aws glue start-trigger --name sales-data-trigger

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Verifying the Trigger State

You can confirm the current status of your trigger by running:

aws glue get-trigger --name sales-data-trigger

The output will include:

{
    "Trigger": {
        "Name": "sales-data-trigger",
        "Type": "SCHEDULED",
        "TriggerState": "DEACTIVATED",
        "Schedule": "cron(0 12 * * ? *)",
        ...
    }
}

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Conclusion

Disabling a trigger in AWS Glue is straightforward once you know the correct commands:

• Use stop-trigger to disable.
• Use start-trigger to re-enable.

This allows you to pause or resume orchestrated jobs without having to delete or recreate triggers, offering more control over your ETL pipelines.

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References

• AWS CLI Command Reference: stop-trigger
• AWS CLI Command Reference: start-trigger
• AWS Glue Triggers Documentation: AWS Glue Triggers