Removing buckets in radosgw (and their contents)

Every once in a while you’ll want to remove a bucket in radosgw, including all the objects contained in that bucket.

Now you might use a utility like s3cmd for that purpose:

s3cmd rb --recursive s3://mybucket

The advantage to this approach is that your users can do it, using just the regular S3 API. But this approach may be slow, particularly if you have previously created your objects with rest-bench, cosbench, or another benchmarking tool.

So in the event that you want to remove buckets, and their objects, directly from radosgw, you can do so with

radosgw-admin bucket rm --bucket=mybucket --purge-objects

This is usually the faster approach.

If, at any time, you want to nuke all buckets owned by a particular user, there is a command for that, as well. Use this one with care:

radosgw-admin user rm --uid=[username] --purge-data

This article originally appeared on the hastexo.com website (now defunct).