terraform-provider-aws: Error creating S3 bucket: BucketAlreadyOwnedByYou: Your previous request to create the named bucket succeeded and you already own it.

Happening for me as well with the latest release

Seeing in Terraform v0.11.11 too

Seeing in Terraform v0.11.10

Seeing it in v0.11.7

Seeing it in v0.11.8

Hi folks 👋

If you are encountering a BucketAlreadyOwnedByYou error with the aws_s3_bucket resource, this means that the S3 Bucket was previously created by some other means (potentially another part of your Terraform configuration) and that you will either need to import the existing S3 Bucket configuration into Terraform or use the aws_s3_bucket data source instead of the aws_s3_bucket resource. Which fix is correct for your environment will be specific to what you are trying to accomplish in your Terraform configuration.

Terraform expects only one source of truth for managing a single piece of infrastructure. While you can technically import a Terraform resource in multiple places (at the moment), their configurations will perpetually conflict with each other if there are differences.

If you are attempting to read-only reference the existing S3 Bucket, replace the resource configuration with a data source configuration. e.g.

data "aws_s3_bucket" "mybucket" {
  bucket = "existing-bucket-name"
}

output "my_bucket_name" {
  value = "${data.aws_s3_bucket.mybucket.bucket}"
}

If you are instead attempting to manage the existing S3 Bucket, the following command can be used to import this resource into Terraform (as documented in the Import section of the aws_s3_bucket resource documentation):

$ terraform import aws_s3_bucket.mybucket existing-bucket-name

We have a current proposal out to start catching errors like these and provide better guidance on what to do in these situations: #9223

Hopefully this helps clear up any confusion. If you’re looking for general assistance, please note that we use GitHub issues in this repository for tracking bugs and enhancements with the Terraform AWS Provider codebase rather than for questions. While we may be able to help with certain simple problems here it’s generally better to use one of the community forums where there are far more people ready to help, whereas the GitHub issues here are generally monitored only by a few maintainers and dedicated community members interested in code development of the Terraform AWS Provider itself.

@aterreno - thanks. I actually fixed my own issue, but as a total noob to terraform shall try to share what I know.

So I was getting weird situation whereby if I didn’t create the s3 bucket explicitly, i got an error about the s3 bucket does not exist yet. And then when i manually added the bucket, i got an error as described here (about already owned bla bla bla).

It turns out I think I misconfigured my remote backend. I inadvertently gave it the same s3 bucket as the s3 resource I was creating with terraform…

Simplified extract:

resource "aws_s3_bucket" "main" {
  bucket = "${var.s3_bucket_prefix}-${var.environment}-${var.s3_region}"
  acl    = "private"
  tags   = "${local.s3_tags}"
  region = "${var.s3_region}"
 ....

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket = "${var.s3_bucket_prefix}-${var.environment}-${var.s3_region}"


    key = "test/backbone"

    encrypt = "true"
     
    ....

By commenting out the terraform backend declaration (effectively getting rid of the remote state management), doing a rm -rf .terraform, and then the usual terraform init, terraform plan, terraform apply sequence it sorted itself out.

As of AWS provider version 1.1.0, there is a data source for aws_s3_bucket: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/d/s3_bucket.html

@kinowarrior see @bflad answer, https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/d/s3_bucket.html that would do it

Seeing in Terraform v0.11.13 too aws provider version 2.4.0