Terraform: Handling the deletion of a non-empty AWS S3 Bucket

This article applies to Terraform v1.1.4

When using Terraform to manage your infrastructure you will end up in the situation when you want to remove some resources.

You can do this in several ways, but most of the time you can also just remove the Terraform configuration by commenting it out the code, or removing the calling of the module, run terraform apply and it will get rid of the resources.

Infrastructure Setup

Assuming an infra with the following setup:

- envs
|__ staging
|_____ main.tf
...
|__ prod
|_____ main.tf
...
- modules
|__ awsresources
|_____ s3.tf
...

Where main.tf file calls the module responsible for creating the AWS resources we need:

module "aws" {
  source       = "../../modules/awsresources"
  bucket_name  = "my-bucket"
  fqdn         = "my-bucket"
  deployer_arn = "***"

  tags = {
  ...
  }
}

And a simple S3 bucket configured as follows:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "name" {
  bucket = var.bucket_name
  acl    = "private"
  policy = data.aws_team_policy_document.bucket_policy.json

  website {
  }

  force_destroy = false

  tags = var.tags
}

We want to destroy these resources, specifically the S3 bucket itself.

Removal of resources

If you run terraform plan it will mark it nicely as to be destroyed:

# module.module_name.aws_s3_bucket.name will be destroyed
  # (because aws_s3_bucket.static_site is not in configuration)
  - resource "aws_s3_bucket" "static_site" {
      - acl                         = "private" -> null
      - arn                         = "***" -> null
      - bucket                      = "***" -> null
      - bucket_domain_name          = "***" -> null
      - bucket_regional_domain_name = "***" -> null
      - force_destroy               = false -> null
      - hosted_zone_id              = "***" -> null
      - id                          = "***" -> null
      - policy                      = jsonencode(
...

But running the terraform apply on the same plan and on a non-empty S3 bucket will result in the following ERROR:

╷
│ Error: error deleting S3 Bucket (***): BucketNotEmpty: The bucket you tried to delete is not empty
│ 	status code: 409, request id: ***, host id: ***
│

Let’s check the S3 bucket configuration again

Checking the configuration, we see that we set the flag force_destroy = false in our case. This is actually a very good check in place to have because it protects you from accidental data loss.

From the Terraform aws provider documentation:

force_destroy - (Optional, Default:false) A boolean that indicates all objects (including any locked objects) should be deleted from the bucket so that the bucket can be destroyed without error. These objects are not recoverable.

In our case we have to set force_destroy = true to allow the bucket to be deleted.

Pay attention: You must apply this change so state is updated first, before running the destroy command.

So let’s change the value to true and apply it on our resource:

 # module.suspended_workspace.aws_s3_bucket.static_site will be updated in-place
  ~ resource "aws_s3_bucket" "name" {
      ~ force_destroy               = false -> true
        id                          = "***"
        tags                        = {
           ...
        }
        # (12 unchanged attributes hidden)
        # (2 unchanged blocks hidden)
    }

Apply complete! Resources: 0 added, 1 changed, 0 destroyed.

After the setting has been applied successfully, we can start deleting the resources by:

removing the module from being called, or
commenting out the resource

and run a terraform apply again to confirm the destruction of the resources.

Alternatively, you can also run: terraform plan -destroy -target=aws_s3_bucket.name

This time the S3 bucket is deleted successfully.

What to do if you noticed the error after some resources have already been destroyed?

So let’s say you already started to apply the destruction of the resources and some are successfully destroyed and some are not, including our S3 bucket. What can you do at this point?

Option 1 You can: Use the -target=resource like below to target the S3 bucket changes only and work only with that resource:

terraform plan -target=module.mymodule.aws_s3_bucket.name
terraform apply -target=module.mymodule.aws_s3_bucket.name

terraform plan -target=aws_s3_bucket.name
terraform apply -target=aws_s3_bucket.name

As a note, you can add multiple resources in any of the commands if you have multiple S3 buckets that need to be deleted.

Option 2 You can:

Re-apply the configuration essentially re-creating the missing resources
Setting the force_destroy flag
Run terraform apply again to destroy the resources

This of course depends on the level of complexity of your infrastructure, in some cases rendering it difficult to do.

And there you go. Hope you find it useful!