AWS Empty Bucket

A custom S3 bucket with an ability to completely delete itself (even if it contains files within).

Remarks

The project is written by Laimonas Sutkus and is owned by iDenfy. This is an open source library intended to be used by anyone. iDenfy aims to share its knowledge and educate market for better and more secure IT infrastructure.

Related technology

This project utilizes the following technology:

• AWS (Amazon Web Services).
• AWS CDK (Amazon Web Services Cloud Development Kit).
• AWS CloudFormation.
• AWS S3 (Amazon Web Services Simple Storage Service).

Assumptions

This library project assumes the following:

• You have knowledge in AWS (Amazon Web Services).
• You have knowledge in AWS CloudFormation and AWS S3.
• You are managing your infrastructure with AWS CDK.
• You are writing AWS CDK templates with a python language.

Install

The project is built and uploaded to PyPi. Install it by using pip.

pip install aws-empty-bucket

Or directly install it through source.

./build.sh -ic

Description

Natively S3 buckets can not be deleted if they contain files. If you were to delete a bucket through CloudFormation, you would get a similar error message:

The bucket you tried to delete is not empty (Service: Amazon S3; Status Code: 409; Error Code: BucketNotEmpty; Request ID: ; S3 Extended Request ID: )

This gets especially annoying if a developer is spinning up and tearing down the infrastructure many times a day. Wouldn't it be awesome if S3 buckets could just be simply deleted in any case?

With this project you can create S3 buckets that can be deleted even if they contain filed inside. A project exposes a class EmptyS3Bucket which can be used exactly the same as a class Bucket provided by AWS CDK. Next time you delete your stack, you will not see that error message again.

Examples

To create an S3 Bucket that can be easily deleted create an EmptyS3Bucket instance in your stack. An example is given below:

from aws_cdk import core, aws_s3
from aws_empty_bucket.empty_s3_bucket import EmptyS3Bucket

class MainStack(core.Stack):
    def __init__(self, scope: core.App) -> None:
        super().__init__(
            scope=scope,
            id='MyCoolStack'
        )

        self.empty_bucket = EmptyS3Bucket(
            self,
            'MyCoolBucketThatCanBeDeleted',
            access_control=aws_s3.BucketAccessControl.PRIVATE,
            bucket_name='mybucket',
        )

To delete inner S3 Bucket files, a custom resource with a lambda function as as a backend is created too. EmptyS3Bucket exposes two properties: backend and custom_resource. If you need to access them use the following:

from aws_empty_bucket.empty_s3_bucket import EmptyS3Bucket

empty_bucket = EmptyS3Bucket(...)

function = empty_bucket.backend
resource = empty_bucket.custom_resource