How do I delete a versioned bucket in AWS S3 using the CLI?

Question

I have tried both s3cmd:

$ s3cmd -r -f -v del s3://my-versioned-bucket/

And the AWS CLI:

$ aws s3 rm s3://my-versioned-bucket/ --recursive

But both of these commands simply add DELETE markers to S3. The command for removing a bucket also doesn't work (from the AWS CLI):

$ aws s3 rb s3://my-versioned-bucket/ --force
Cleaning up. Please wait...
Completed 1 part(s) with ... file(s) remaining
remove_bucket failed: s3://my-versioned-bucket/ A client error (BucketNotEmpty) occurred when calling the DeleteBucket operation: The bucket you tried to delete is not empty. You must delete all versions in the bucket.

Ok... how? There's no information in their documentation for this. S3Cmd says it's a 'fully-featured' S3 command-line tool, but it makes no reference to versions other than its own. Is there any way to do this without using the web interface, which will take forever and requires me to keep my laptop on?

Answer 1

I ran into the same limitation of the AWS CLI. I found the easiest solution to be to use Python and boto3:

#!/usr/bin/env python

BUCKET = 'your-bucket-here'

import boto3

s3 = boto3.resource('s3')
bucket = s3.Bucket(BUCKET)
bucket.object_versions.delete()

# if you want to delete the now-empty bucket as well, uncomment this line:
#bucket.delete()

A previous version of this answer used boto but that solution had performance issues with large numbers of keys as Chuckles pointed out.