What it does

Creates an S3 bucket in Cloud Formation that will automatically be emptied before the bucket is destroyed by Cloud Formation.

How to use it

This is an AWS CDK Construct which makes it dead simple to use in your CDK code.

Just install with npm:

npm add auto-delete-bucket

And then require the construct and use it in your stack like any standard CDK resource!

import { AutoDeleteBucket } from 'auto-delete-bucket'

export class ExampleStack extends Stack {
  constructor(scope: App, id: string, props?: StackProps) {
    super(scope, id, props)

    /**
     * NOTE: S3 requires bucket names to be globally unique across accounts so
     * you will need to change the bucketName to something that nobody else is
     * using.
     */
    new AutoDeleteBucket(this, 'example-autobucket-1', {
      bucketName: 'autoexample-bucket1'
    })
  }
}

See the example directory for a complete CDK example. Be sure to change the bucketNames so they are unique.

The bucket can be configured with any of the standard CDK Bucket Properties.

Requirements

• This is designed to work with AWS CDK but feel free to borrow the code if you want to create the custom CF resource some other way.
• Does not yet work with versioned buckets but it can be easily adapted to do so (pull requests welcome.)

Motivation

Cloud Formation will often fail to actually delete your S3 Bucket resources when you destroy your stack. This happens whenever the bucket is not empty as the Cloud Formation documentation clearly states:

You can only delete empty buckets. Deletion fails for buckets that have contents.

We find that in most of our use cases, we want to automatically delete the bucket and it's contents whenever the stack is deleted. Otherwise you will have a bunch of orphaned buckets to clean up manualy. The problem is even worse when you need to explicitly name the bucket (ex. for a website), because you won't be able to recreate the stack due to the fact that a bucket already exists with that name.

How it Works

Create a custom resource that will automatically delete your bucket contents before attempting bucket deletion.

Running Tests

yarn test

Publish to NPM (Official maintainers only)

Add npm user to your local machine (one time setup)

npm adduser

Make sure the working directly is clean (all local changes are committed or stashed.) Bump the version (major, minor or patch) as follows:

npm run bump:minor

Push the release

npm publish

Push the tagged source back up to Github

git push --tags

More Information

See the AWS documentation for more information on S3 and deleting bucket contents.