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

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.

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.

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.