Automatically delete old items from s3 bucket

Question

Is there an easy way to set up a bucket in s3 to automatically delete files older than x days?

Answer 1

Amazon has meanwhile introduced S3 lifecycles (see the introductory blog post Amazon S3 - Object Expiration), where you can specify a maximum age in days for objects in a bucket - see Object Expiration for details on its usage via the S3 API or the AWS Management Console.

Answer 2

Amazon now has the ability to set bucket policies to automatically expire content:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/how-to-set-lifecycle-configuration-intro.html

Answer 3

You can use s3cmd to write a script to run through your bucket and delete files based on a precondition.

You'll need to write some code (bash, python) on top of it.

You can download s3cmd from http://s3tools.org/s3cmd

Answer 4

shell script to delete old buckets using s3cmd utility
source : http://shout.setfive.com/2011/12/05/deleting-files-older-than-specified-time-with-s3cmd-and-bash/

#!/bin/bash
# Usage: ./deleteOld "bucketname" "30 days"
s3cmd ls s3://$1 | while read -r line;  do

createDate=`echo $line|awk {'print $1" "$2'}`
createDate=`date -d"$createDate" +%s`
olderThan=`date -d"-$2" +%s`
if [[ $createDate -lt $olderThan ]]
  then 
    fileName=`echo $line|awk '{$1=$2=$3=""; print $0}' | sed 's/^[ \t]*//'`
    echo $fileName
    if [[ $fileName != "" ]]
      then
        s3cmd del "$fileName"
    fi
fi
done;

Answer 5

WINDOWS / POWERSHELL

If the lifecycle indication does not suit you, then on Windows Server this can be done by writing a simple PowerShell script

#set a bucket name
$bucket = "my-bucket-name"

#set the expiration date of files
$limit_date = (Get-Date).AddDays(-30)

#get all the files
$files = aws s3 ls "$($bucket)"

#extract the file name and date
$parsed = $files | ForEach-Object { @{ date = $_.split(' ')[0] ; fname = $_.split(' ')[-1] } }

#filter files older than $limit_date
$filtred = $parsed | Where-Object { ![string]::IsNullOrEmpty($_.date) -and [datetime]::parseexact($_.date, 'yyyy-MM-dd', $null) -ge  $limit_date }

#remove filtered files
$filtred | ForEach-Object { aws s3 rm "s3://$($bucket)/$($_.fname)" }

This script can fit into one command. Just replace my-bucket-name with the name of your bucket.

aws s3 ls my-backet-name | ForEach-Object { @{ date = $_.split(' ')[0] ; fname = $_.split(' ')[-1] } }| Where-Object { ![string]::IsNullOrEmpty($_.date) -and [datetime]::parseexact($_.date, 'yyyy-MM-dd', $null) -ge  $limit_date } | ForEach-Object { aws s3 rm s3://my-backet-name/$_.fname }

Note that this script will only delete files from the root directory but not recursively. If you need to remove data from a subdirectory, then specify it before /$_.fname

Answer 6

Here is a Python script to delete N days old files

from boto3 import client, Session
from botocore.exceptions import ClientError
from datetime import datetime, timezone
import argparse

if __name__ == '__main__':

    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    
    parser.add_argument('--access_key_id', required=True)
    parser.add_argument('--secret_access_key', required=True)
    parser.add_argument('--delete_after_retention_days', required=False, default=15)
    parser.add_argument('--bucket', required=True)
    parser.add_argument('--prefix', required=False, default="")
    parser.add_argument('--endpoint', required=True)

    args = parser.parse_args()

    access_key_id = args.access_key_id
    secret_access_key = args.secret_access_key
    delete_after_retention_days = int(args.delete_after_retention_days)
    bucket = args.bucket
    prefix = args.prefix
    endpoint = args.endpoint

    # get current date
    today = datetime.now(timezone.utc)

    try:
        # create a connection to Wasabi
        s3_client = client(
            's3',
            endpoint_url=endpoint,
            access_key_id=access_key_id,
            secret_access_key=secret_access_key)
    except Exception as e:
        raise e

    try:
        # list all the buckets under the account
        list_buckets = s3_client.list_buckets()
    except ClientError:
        # invalid access keys
        raise Exception("Invalid Access or Secret key")

    # create a paginator for all objects.
    object_response_paginator = s3_client.get_paginator('list_object_versions')
    if len(prefix) > 0:
        operation_parameters = {'Bucket': bucket,
                                'Prefix': prefix}
    else:
        operation_parameters = {'Bucket': bucket}

    # instantiate temp variables.
    delete_list = []
    count_current = 0
    count_non_current = 0

    print("$ Paginating bucket " + bucket)
    for object_response_itr in object_response_paginator.paginate(**operation_parameters):
        for version in object_response_itr['Versions']:
            if version["IsLatest"] is True:
                count_current += 1
            elif version["IsLatest"] is False:
                count_non_current += 1
            if (today - version['LastModified']).days > delete_after_retention_days:
                delete_list.append({'Key': version['Key'], 'VersionId': version['VersionId']})

    # print objects count
    print("-" * 20)
    print("$ Before deleting objects")
    print("$ current objects: " + str(count_current))
    print("$ non-current objects: " + str(count_non_current))
    print("-" * 20)

    # delete objects 1000 at a time
    print("$ Deleting objects from bucket " + bucket)
    for i in range(0, len(delete_list), 1000):
        response = s3_client.delete_objects(
            Bucket=bucket,
            Delete={
                'Objects': delete_list[i:i + 1000],
                'Quiet': True
            }
        )
        print(response)

    # reset counts
    count_current = 0
    count_non_current = 0

    # paginate and recount
    print("$ Paginating bucket " + bucket)
    for object_response_itr in object_response_paginator.paginate(Bucket=bucket):
        if 'Versions' in object_response_itr:
            for version in object_response_itr['Versions']:
                if version["IsLatest"] is True:
                    count_current += 1
                elif version["IsLatest"] is False:
                    count_non_current += 1

    # print objects count
    print("-" * 20)
    print("$ After deleting objects")
    print("$ current objects: " + str(count_current))
    print("$ non-current objects: " + str(count_non_current))
    print("-" * 20)
    print("$ task complete")

And here is how I run it

python s3_cleanup.py --aws_access_key_id="access-key" --aws_secret_access_key="secret-key-here" --endpoint="https://s3.us-west-1.wasabisys.com" --bucket="ondemand-downloads" --prefix="" --delete_after_retention_days=5

If you want to delete files only from a specific folder then use prefix parameter

Answer 7

Edit:

Since Amazon introduced s3 object expiration on Dec 27, 2011, this answer is no longer valid.

No, S3 is just a datastore. You'll need to use some outside client to periodically delete the old files.

Answer 8

I found much faster solution delete batch using AWS cli

#!/usr/bin/env php
<?php
//remove files which were created 24 hrs ago
$fcmd = 'aws s3 ls s3://<bucket>/<prefix>/ | awk \'{$3=""; print $0}\'';//remove file size and handle file with spaces

exec($fcmd, $output, $return_var);
$seconds_24_hour = 24 * 60 * 60;
$file_deleted_count = 0;
if (!empty($output)) {
    $deleted_keys = array();
    foreach ($output as $file) {
        $file_path = substr($file, 21);
        $file_time_stamp = substr($file, 0, 19); //2017-09-19 07:59:41
        if (time() - strtotime($file_time_stamp) > $seconds_24_hour) {
            $deleted_keys[]["Key"] = "<prefix>/" . $file_path;
            $file_deleted_count++;
        }
    }
    if (!empty($deleted_keys)) {
        $json_data_delete = array("Objects" => $deleted_keys);
        echo $cmd = ("aws s3api delete-objects --bucket <bucket> --delete '" . json_encode($json_data_delete) . "'");
        system($cmd);
    }
    echo "\n$file_deleted_count files deleted from content_media\n";
}

Reference for batch delete https://stackoverflow.com/a/41734090/1589444

Reference for handling file with space with 100% pass case https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36813327/how-to-display-only-files-from-aws-s3-ls-command