Can't Delete Empty S3 Bucket

Question

I have an S3 bucket that is 100% empty. Versioning was never enabled on the bucket. However, I still cannot remove the bucket. I have tried via the Console and the CLI tool. On the console it just says "Error" with no error message. From the cli and api it tells me: "An error occurred (BucketNotEmpty) when calling the DeleteBucket operation: The bucket you tried to delete is not empty". I have tried all of the following:

aws s3 rb s3://<bucket_name> --force -> BucketNotEmpty

aws s3 rm s3://<bucket_name> --recursive -> No output (because it's already empty)

aws s3api list-object-versions --bucket <bucket_name> -> No output (because versioning was never enabled)

aws s3api list-multipart-uploads --bucket <bucket_name> -> No outputs

aws s3api list-objects --delimiter=/ --prefix= --bucket <bucket_name> -> No Output (because it's empty)

• It has no dependencies (it's not used by cloudfront or anything else that I'm aware of).
• The bucket has been empty for approximately 5 days.
• I was able to delete another very similar bucket with the same IAM user. Additionally my IAM user has Admin access.

Answer 1

For users who are facing similar issue. I tried @Federico solution still no success. There was an other option "Empty" next to delete.

So I emptied the bucket first and then tried delete, it worked.

Answer 2

I was facing this same problem. I was able to fix the issue by going into the bucket and deleting the "Bucket Policy" for the bucket. After that, deleting the bucket worked correctly.

I did this through the AWS console, for an S3 bucket created by Elastic Beanstalk (ie elasticbeanstalk-us-west-2-861587641234). I imagine the creation script includes a policy to prevent people from accidentally deleting the bucket.

Answer 3

I tried to look at many of the solutions mentioned. The only thing that worked for me is deleting it through Cyberduck (I neither work for nor am promoting Cyberduck, i genuinely used it and it worked). Here are the steps of what I did:

1 - Download and install Cyberduck.

2 - Click on Open Connection

3 - Select Amazon S3 from the dropdown (default would be FTP)

4 - Enter your access key ID and secret Access key (if you dont have one then you need to create one on your s3 bucket through IAM on AWS)

5 - You will see a list your S3 buckets. Select the file or folder or bucket you want to delete, right click and delete. Even files with 0kb show up here and can be deleted.

Hope this helps

Answer 4

I had a similar issue and was able to delete the bucket after waiting overnight. It's a pretty weak solution but may save you and other some time from pounding on it.

If it's still not deleting after all the actions in the comments there are some things that only AWS support can fix properly. Again a weak answer but register a ticket with AWS support and then post their response here as an answer for others.

Answer 5

This is what had worked for me. I didn't have versioning enabled on the bucket. When you delete an object from s3 bucket, it puts a 'delete marker' on that object and hides it from the listing. When you click 'show' version button you will see your deleted objects with the delete marker. Select this object (with delete marker) and delete again. This is a permanent delete. Now your object is really gone and your bucket is really empty. After this I was able to delete my bucket.

I guess, versioning=true only means that s3 will create versions of the object if you upload with the same name.

Answer 6

I am using the AWS Console to perform deletion of the bucket.

had the same problem and I tried all the above solutions and not worked for me then I figured out another way. My bucket was used by ElasticBean and whenever I deleted the bucket the ElasticBean created one automatically. I then deleted the ElasticBean service and tried to delete the bucket again but not worked again this time, the bucket was empty but was not allowing to delete. I tried to change permissions but the bucket was still there.

Finally I deleted the bucket policy and came back and deleted the bucket and it was gone. Problem solved