S3 bucket versioning is like the trash function in operating systems. It saves the day when you accidentally remove something that should not be removed. It gets even better! Versioning allows you to restore the previous version when you overwrite a file that should not be overwritten.

In this article, I show you how to enable versioning of an S3 bucket using Terraform. Of course, keeping the old version and removed files costs money and, most likely, is unnecessary, so we should remove the old versions after some time. I will show you how to do it too!

We will need two things:

• the name of the bucket
• the number of days after which we want to remove the old versions

When we have all of that, we can define the bucket in Terraform configuration. In this example, I enable versioning of bucket called my_lovely_bucket. I want to remove the old versions after seven days:

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resource "aws_s3_bucket" "my_lovely_bucket" {
    bucket = "my_lovely_bucket"
    acl = "private"

    versioning {
        enabled = true
    }

    lifecycle_rule {
        enabled = true

        noncurrent_version_expiration {
            days = 7
        }
    }
}