How to create a folder in an amazon S3 bucket using terraform

Question

I was able to create a bucket in an amazon S3 using this link.

I used the following code to create a bucket :

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "b" {
    bucket = "my_tf_test_bucket"
    acl    = "private"
}

Now I wanted to create folders inside the bucket, say Folder1.

I found the link for creating an S3 object. But this has a mandatory parameter source. I am not sure what this value have to , since my intent is to create a folder inside the S3 bucket.

Answer 1

For running terraform on Mac or Linux, the following will do what you want

resource "aws_s3_bucket_object" "folder1" {
    bucket = "${aws_s3_bucket.b.id}"
    acl    = "private"
    key    = "Folder1/"
    source = "/dev/null"
}

If you're on windows you can use an empty file.

While folks will be pedantic about s3 not having folders, there are a number of operations where having an object placeholder for a key prefix (otherwise called a folder) make life easier. Like s3 sync for example.

Answer 2

Actually, there is a canonical way to create it, without being OS dependent, by inspecting the Network on a UI put you see the content headers, as stated by : https://stackoverflow.com/users/1554386/alastair-mccormack ,

And S3 does support folders these days as visible from the UI.

So this is how you can achieve it:

resource "aws_s3_bucket_object" "base_folder" {
    bucket  = "${aws_s3_bucket.default.id}"
    acl     = "private"
    key     =  "${var.named_folder}/"
    content_type = "application/x-directory"
    kms_key_id = "key_arn_if_used"
}

Please notice the trailing slash otherwise it creates an empty file

Above has been used with a Windows OS to successfully create a folder using terraform s3_bucket_object.

Answer 3

S3 doesn't support folders. Objects can have prefix names with slashes that look like folders, but that's just part of the object name. So there's no way to create a folder in terraform or anything else, because there's no such thing as a folder in S3.

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/UsingMetadata.html http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSImportExport/latest/DG/ManipulatingS3KeyNames.html

If you want to pretend, you could create a zero-byte object in the bucket named "Folder1/" but that's not required. You can just create objects with key names like "Folder1/File1" and it will work.