S3 bucket default removal policy not respected

[thesurlydev]

Describe the bug
Documentation states that the RemovalPolicy.Destroy is the default but if you don't explicitly set the value, the S3 bucket will not be removed on cdk destroy.

To Reproduce
The following code will not destroy the S3 bucket:

val buildBucket = Bucket(this, "buildbucket", BucketProps.builder()
            .withBucketName(props.buildBucketName)
            .build()
        )

However, explicitly setting RemovalPolicy will destroy the bucket during cdk destroy:

val buildBucket = Bucket(this, "buildbucket", BucketProps.builder()
            .withBucketName(props.buildBucketName)
            .withRemovalPolicy(RemovalPolicy.Destroy)
            .build()
        )

Expected behavior
S3 bucket should be destroyed without explicitly defining removal policy.

Version:

• Ubuntu
• Java/Kotlin
• 0.31.0

[schof]

If there are any files in the bucket, Cloudformation will not delete the S3 bucket, no matter what you say or how you ask. In other words, this is not a CDK-specific issue.

I agree this is a PITA which is why I created AutoDeleteBucket which will do what you want.

Protip: You can specify anAutoDeleteBucket anywhere can use Bucket which allows you to automatically delete buckets associated with codepipeline, etc.

[thesurlydev]

@schof I understand bucket deletion is not allowed if it's not empty but that's not the case here.

At the very least, the documentation should be updated or behavior changed to match what the docs say.

[RomainMuller]

The documentation fairly unambiguously states that the default behavior for s3.BucketProps.removalPolicy is to orphan the bucket.

[nija-at]

As stated in #3297, this will either be supported by Cloudformation or to incorporate force deletion of S3 buckets into CDK as custom resource.

Recommend continuing the conversation at #3297. Closing this issue.