Fast way of deleting non-empty Google bucket?

Question

Is this my only option or is there a faster way?

# Delete contents in bucket (takes a long time on large bucket)
gsutil -m rm -r gs://my-bucket/*

# Remove bucke         


        

Answer 1

Buckets are required to be empty before they're deleted. So before you can delete a bucket, you have to delete all of the objects it contains.

You can do this with gsutil rm -r (documentation). Just don't pass the * wildcard and it will delete the bucket itself after it has deleted all of the objects.

gsutil -m rm -r gs://my-bucket

Google Cloud Storage bucket deletes can't succeed until the bucket listing returns 0 objects. If objects remain, you can get a Bucket Not Empty error (or in the UI's case 'Bucket Not Ready') when trying to delete the bucket.

gsutil has built-in retry logic to delete both buckets and objects.