Amazon S3 boto - how to delete folder?

Question

I created a folder in s3 named \"test\" and I pushed \"test_1.jpg\", \"test_2.jpg\" into \"test\".

How can I use boto to delete folder \"test\"?

Answer 1

You can use bucket.delete_keys() with a list of keys (with a large number of keys I found this to be an order of magnitude faster than using key.delete).

Something like this:

delete_key_list = []
for key in bucket.list(prefix='/your/directory/'):
    delete_key_list.append(key)
    if len(delete_key_list) > 100:
        bucket.delete_keys(delete_key_list)
        delete_key_list = []

if len(delete_key_list) > 0:
    bucket.delete_keys(delete_key_list)

Answer 2

If versioning is enabled on the S3 bucket:

s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
bucket = s3.Bucket('mybucket')
bucket.object_versions.filter(Prefix="myprefix/").delete()

Answer 3

Here is 2018 (almost 2019) version:

s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
bucket = s3.Bucket('mybucket')
bucket.objects.filter(Prefix="myprefix/").delete()

Answer 4

There are no folders in S3. Instead, the keys form a flat namespace. However a key with slashes in its name shows specially in some programs, including the AWS console (see for example Amazon S3 boto - how to create a folder?).

Instead of deleting "a directory", you can (and have to) list files by prefix and delete. In essence:

for key in bucket.list(prefix='your/directory/'):
    key.delete()

However the other accomplished answers on this page feature more efficient approaches.

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Notice that the prefix is just searched using dummy string search. If the prefix was your/directory, that is, without the trailing slash appended, the program would also happily delete your/directory-that-you-wanted-to-remove-is-definitely-not-t‌​his-one.

For more information, see S3 boto list keys sometimes returns directory key.

Answer 5

A slight improvement on Patrick's solution. As you might know, both list_objects() and delete_objects() have an object limit of 1000. This is why you have to paginate listing and delete in chunks. This is pretty universal and you can give Prefix to paginator.paginate() to delete subdirectories/paths

client = boto3.client('s3', **credentials)
paginator = client.get_paginator('list_objects_v2')
pages = paginator.paginate(Bucket=self.bucket_name)

delete_us = dict(Objects=[])
for item in pages.search('Contents'):
    delete_us['Objects'].append(dict(Key=item['Key']))

    # flush once aws limit reached
    if len(delete_us['Objects']) >= 1000:
        client.delete_objects(Bucket=bucket, Delete=delete_us)
        delete_us = dict(Objects=[])

# flush rest
if len(delete_us['Objects']):
    client.delete_objects(Bucket=bucket, Delete=delete_us)

Answer 6

I feel that it's been a while and boto3 has a few different ways of accomplishing this goal. This assumes you want to delete the test "folder" and all of its objects Here is one way:

s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
objects_to_delete = s3.meta.client.list_objects(Bucket="MyBucket", Prefix="myfolder/test/")

delete_keys = {'Objects' : []}
delete_keys['Objects'] = [{'Key' : k} for k in [obj['Key'] for obj in objects_to_delete.get('Contents', [])]]

s3.meta.client.delete_objects(Bucket="MyBucket", Delete=delete_keys)

This should make two requests, one to fetch the objects in the folder, the second to delete all objects in said folder.

https://boto3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/reference/services/s3.html#S3.Client.delete_objects