Delete Amazon S3 buckets? [closed]

Question

I've been interacting with Amazon S3 through S3Fox and I can't seem to delete my buckets. I select a bucket, hit delete, confirm the delete in a popup, and... nothing happens. Is there another tool that I should use?

Answer 1

I've implemented bucket-destroy, a multi threaded utility that does everything it takes to delete a bucket. I handle non empty buckets, as well as version enabled bucket keys.

You can read the blog post here http://bytecoded.blogspot.com/2011/01/recursive-delete-utility-for-version.html and the instructions here http://code.google.com/p/bucket-destroy/

I've successfully deleted with it a bucket that contains double '//' in the key name, versioned key and DeleteMarker keys. Currently I'm running it on a bucket that contains ~40,000,000 so far I've been able to delete 1,200,000 in several hours on m1.large. Note that the utility is multi threaded but does not (yet) implemented shuffling (which will horizontal scaling, launching the utility on several machines).

Answer 2

This is what I use. Just simple ruby code.

case bucket.size
  when 0
    puts "Nothing left to delete"
  when 1..1000
    bucket.objects.each do |item|
      item.delete
      puts "Deleting - #{bucket.size} left"        
    end
end

Answer 3

If you have ruby (and rubygems) installed, install aws-s3 gem with

gem install aws-s3

or

sudo gem install aws-s3

create a file delete_bucket.rb:

require "rubygems" # optional
require "aws/s3"
AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(
  :access_key_id     => 'access_key_id',
  :secret_access_key => 'secret_access_key')
AWS::S3::Bucket.delete("bucket_name", :force => true)

and run it:

ruby delete_bucket.rb

Since Bucket#delete returned timeout exceptions a lot for me, I have expanded the script:

require "rubygems" # optional
require "aws/s3"
AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(
  :access_key_id     => 'access_key_id',
  :secret_access_key => 'secret_access_key')
while AWS::S3::Bucket.find("bucket_name")
  begin
    AWS::S3::Bucket.delete("bucket_name", :force => true)
  rescue
  end
end

Answer 4

If you use amazon's console and on a one-time basis need to clear out a bucket: You can browse to your bucket then select the top key then scroll to the bottom and then press shift on your keyboard then click on the bottom one. It will select all in between then you can right click and delete.

Answer 5

This is a hard problem. My solution is at http://stuff.mit.edu/~jik/software/delete-s3-bucket.pl.txt. It describes all of the things I've determined can go wrong in a comment at the top. Here's the current version of the script (if I change it, I'll put a new version at the URL but probably not here).

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Copyright (c) 2010 Jonathan Kamens.
# Released under the GNU General Public License, Version 3.
# See <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

# $Id: delete-s3-bucket.pl,v 1.3 2010/10/17 03:21:33 jik Exp $

# Deleting an Amazon S3 bucket is hard.
#
# * You can't delete the bucket unless it is empty.
#
# * There is no API for telling Amazon to empty the bucket, so you have to
# delete all of the objects one by one yourself.
#
# * If you've recently added a lot of large objects to the bucket, then they
# may not all be visible yet on all S3 servers. This means that even after the
# server you're talking to thinks all the objects are all deleted and lets you
# delete the bucket, additional objects can continue to propagate around the S3
# server network. If you then recreate the bucket with the same name, those
# additional objects will magically appear in it!
# 
# It is not clear to me whether the bucket delete will eventually propagate to
# all of the S3 servers and cause all the objects in the bucket to go away, but
# I suspect it won't. I also suspect that you may end up continuing to be
# charged for these phantom objects even though the bucket they're in is no
# longer even visible in your S3 account.
#
# * If there's a CR, LF, or CRLF in an object name, then it's sent just that
# way in the XML that gets sent from the S3 server to the client when the
# client asks for a list of objects in the bucket. Unfortunately, the XML
# parser on the client will probably convert it to the local line ending
# character, and if it's different from the character that's actually in the
# object name, you then won't be able to delete it. Ugh! This is a bug in the
# S3 protocol; it should be enclosing the object names in CDATA tags or
# something to protect them from being munged by the XML parser.
#
# Note that this bug even affects the AWS Web Console provided by Amazon!
#
# * If you've got a whole lot of objects and you serialize the delete process,
# it'll take a long, long time to delete them all.

use threads;
use strict;
use warnings;

# Keys can have newlines in them, which screws up the communication
# between the parent and child processes, so use URL encoding to deal
# with that. 
use CGI qw(escape unescape); # Easiest place to get this functionality.
use File::Basename;
use Getopt::Long;
use Net::Amazon::S3;

my $whoami = basename $0;
my $usage = "Usage: $whoami [--help] --access-key-id=id --secret-access-key=key
 --bucket=name [--processes=#] [--wait=#] [--nodelete]

    Specify --processes to indicate how many deletes to perform in
    parallel. You're limited by RAM (to hold the parallel threads) and
    bandwidth for the S3 delete requests.

    Specify --wait to indicate seconds to require the bucket to be verified
    empty. This is necessary if you create a huge number of objects and then
    try to delete the bucket before they've all propagated to all the S3
    servers (I've seen a huge backlog of newly created objects take *hours* to
    propagate everywhere). See the comment at the top of the script for more
    information about this issue.

    Specify --nodelete to empty the bucket without actually deleting it.\n";

my($aws_access_key_id, $aws_secret_access_key, $bucket_name, $wait);
my $procs = 1;
my $delete = 1;

die if (! GetOptions(
       "help" => sub { print $usage; exit; },
       "access-key-id=s" => \$aws_access_key_id,
       "secret-access-key=s" => \$aws_secret_access_key,
       "bucket=s" => \$bucket_name,
       "processess=i" => \$procs,
       "wait=i" => \$wait,
       "delete!" => \$delete,
 ));
die if (! ($aws_access_key_id && $aws_secret_access_key && $bucket_name));

my $increment = 0;

print "Incrementally deleting the contents of $bucket_name\n";

$| = 1;

my(@procs, $current);
for (1..$procs) {
    my($read_from_parent, $write_to_child);
    my($read_from_child, $write_to_parent);
    pipe($read_from_parent, $write_to_child) or die;
    pipe($read_from_child, $write_to_parent) or die;
    threads->create(sub {
 close($read_from_child);
 close($write_to_child);
 my $old_select = select $write_to_parent;
 $| = 1;
 select $old_select;
 &child($read_from_parent, $write_to_parent);
      }) or die;
    close($read_from_parent);
    close($write_to_parent);
    my $old_select = select $write_to_child;
    $| = 1;
    select $old_select;
    push(@procs, [$read_from_child, $write_to_child]);
}

my $s3 = Net::Amazon::S3->new({aws_access_key_id => $aws_access_key_id,
          aws_secret_access_key => $aws_secret_access_key,
          retry => 1,
         });
my $bucket = $s3->bucket($bucket_name);

my $deleted = 1;
my $total_deleted = 0;
my $last_start = time;
my($start, $waited);
while ($deleted > 0) {
    $start = time;
    print "\nLoading ", ($increment ? "up to $increment" :
    "as many as possible")," keys...\n";
    my $response = $bucket->list({$increment ? ('max-keys' => $increment) : ()})
 or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr . "\n";
    $deleted = scalar(@{ $response->{keys} }) ;
    if (! $deleted) {
 if ($wait and ! $waited) {
     my $delta = $wait - ($start - $last_start);
     if ($delta > 0) {
  print "Waiting $delta second(s) to confirm bucket is empty\n";
  sleep($delta);
  $waited = 1;
  $deleted = 1;
  next;
     }
     else {
  last;
     }
 }
 else {
     last;
 }
    }
    else {
 $waited = undef;
    }
    $total_deleted += $deleted;
    print "\nDeleting $deleted keys($total_deleted total)...\n";
    $current = 0;
    foreach my $key ( @{ $response->{keys} } ) {
 my $key_name = $key->{key};
 while (! &send(escape($key_name) . "\n")) {
     print "Thread $current died\n";
     die "No threads left\n" if (@procs == 1);
     if ($current == @procs-1) {
  pop @procs;
  $current = 0;
     }
     else {
  $procs[$current] = pop @procs;
     }
 }
 $current = ($current + 1) % @procs;
 threads->yield();
    }
    print "Sending sync message\n";
    for ($current = 0; $current < @procs; $current++) {
 if (! &send("\n")) {
     print "Thread $current died sending sync\n";
     if ($current = @procs-1) {
  pop @procs;
  last;
     }
     $procs[$current] = pop @procs;
     $current--;
 }
 threads->yield();
    }
    print "Reading sync response\n";
    for ($current = 0; $current < @procs; $current++) {
 if (! &receive()) {
     print "Thread $current died reading sync\n";
     if ($current = @procs-1) {
  pop @procs;
  last;
     }
     $procs[$current] = pop @procs;
     $current--;
 }
 threads->yield();
    }    
}
continue {
    $last_start = $start;
}

if ($delete) {
    print "Deleting bucket...\n";
    $bucket->delete_bucket or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr;
    print "Done.\n";
}

sub send {
    my($str) = @_;
    my $fh = $procs[$current]->[1];
    print($fh $str);
}

sub receive {
    my $fh = $procs[$current]->[0];
    scalar <$fh>;
}

sub child {
    my($read, $write) = @_;
    threads->detach();
    my $s3 = Net::Amazon::S3->new({aws_access_key_id => $aws_access_key_id,
       aws_secret_access_key => $aws_secret_access_key,
       retry => 1,
      });
    my $bucket = $s3->bucket($bucket_name);
    while (my $key = <$read>) {
 if ($key eq "\n") {
     print($write "\n") or die;
     next;
 }
 chomp $key;
 $key = unescape($key);
 if ($key =~ /[\r\n]/) {
     my(@parts) = split(/\r\n|\r|\n/, $key, -1);
     my(@guesses) = shift @parts;
     foreach my $part (@parts) {
  @guesses = (map(($_ . "\r\n" . $part,
     $_ . "\r"   . $part,
     $_ . "\n"   . $part), @guesses));
     }
     foreach my $guess (@guesses) {
  if ($bucket->get_key($guess)) {
      $key = $guess;
      last;
  }
     }
 }
 $bucket->delete_key($key) or
     die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr . "\n";
 print ".";
 threads->yield();
    }
    return;
}

Answer 6

Remeber that S3 Buckets need to be empty before they can be deleted. The good news is that most 3rd party tools automate this process. If you are running into problems with S3Fox, I recommend trying S3FM for GUI or S3Sync for command line. Amazon has a great article describing how to use S3Sync. After setting up your variables, the key command is

./s3cmd.rb deleteall <your bucket name>

Deleting buckets with lots of individual files tends to crash a lot of S3 tools because they try to display a list of all files in the directory. You need to find a way to delete in batches. The best GUI tool I've found for this purpose is Bucket Explorer. It deletes files in a S3 bucket in 1000 file chunks and does not crash when trying to open large buckets like s3Fox and S3FM.

I've also found a few scripts that you can use for this purpose. I haven't tried these scripts yet but they look pretty straightforward.

RUBY

require 'aws/s3'

AWS::S3::Base.establish_connection!(
:access_key_id => 'your access key',
:secret_access_key => 'your secret key'
)

bucket = AWS::S3::Bucket.find('the bucket name')

while(!bucket.empty?)
begin
puts "Deleting objects in bucket"

bucket.objects.each do |object|
object.delete
puts "There are #{bucket.objects.size} objects left in the bucket"
end

puts "Done deleting objects"

rescue SocketError
puts "Had socket error"
end

end

PERL

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::Amazon::S3;
my $aws_access_key_id = 'your access key';
my $aws_secret_access_key = 'your secret access key';
my $increment = 50; # 50 at a time
my $bucket_name = 'bucket_name';

my $s3 = Net::Amazon::S3->new({aws_access_key_id => $aws_access_key_id, aws_secret_access_key => $aws_secret_access_key, retry => 1, });
my $bucket = $s3->bucket($bucket_name);

print "Incrementally deleting the contents of $bucket_name\n";

my $deleted = 1;
my $total_deleted = 0;
while ($deleted > 0) {
print "Loading up to $increment keys...\n";
$response = $bucket->list({'max-keys' => $increment, }) or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr . "\n";
$deleted = scalar(@{ $response->{keys} }) ;
$total_deleted += $deleted;
print "Deleting $deleted keys($total_deleted total)...\n";
foreach my $key ( @{ $response->{keys} } ) {
my $key_name = $key->{key};
$bucket->delete_key($key->{key}) or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr . "\n";
}
}
print "Deleting bucket...\n";
$bucket->delete_bucket or die $s3->err . ": " . $s3->errstr;
print "Done.\n";

SOURCE: Tarkblog

Hope this helps!