How to Import an AWS S3 Bucket Ownership Controls into Terraform

Import AWS S3 Bucket Ownership Controls with Terraback (recommended)

Terraback reverse-engineers your live infrastructure: it reads the Amazon S3 resource with read-only credentials, generates the HCL, and produces the exact import block. Two commands take you from a live AWS S3 Bucket Ownership Controls to managed Terraform.

terraback scan all aws --region us-east-1

terraback aws import --method bulk

The Terraform import block

Terraback emits a Terraform 1.5+ import block like the one below. Because the block lives in your configuration, the import is reviewable in a pull request and repeatable across environments.

import {
  to = aws_s3_bucket_ownership_controls.example
  id = "my-app-assets"
}

Example aws_s3_bucket_ownership_controls configuration

Here is a realistic AWS S3 Bucket Ownership Controls block. Terraback generates a fuller version from your actual resource attributes; this is a minimal, valid starting point.

resource "aws_s3_bucket_ownership_controls" "example" {
  bucket = "my-app-assets"

  rule {
    object_ownership = "BucketOwnerEnforced"
  }
}

Gotchas when importing a AWS S3 Bucket Ownership Controls

• Ownership controls are a sub-resource of an aws_s3_bucket and import by the bucket name; the bucket itself is a separate resource imported by the same name.
• object_ownership accepts only BucketOwnerEnforced, BucketOwnerPreferred, or ObjectWriter; BucketOwnerEnforced disables ACLs entirely, which can conflict with an aws_s3_bucket_acl resource on the same bucket.
• If you also manage aws_s3_bucket_acl, the acl resource must depend on this one so ownership is set before ACLs are applied; order matters after import.
• This resource exists exactly once per bucket, so do not define it twice for the same bucket name.

Doing it manually with terraform import

The native approach is to write the aws_s3_bucket_ownership_controls block by hand, then run terraform import aws_s3_bucket_ownership_controls.example <import-id> for every resource, one at a time. That works for a handful of resources, but it does not scale: you author all the HCL yourself and repeat the command for each item. Terraback generates the HCL and the import blocks for your whole account in one pass.

Import other AWS resources