Terraform data source of an existing S3 bucket fails plan stage attempting a GetBucketWebsite request which returns NoSuchWebsiteConfiguration - amazon-s3

Question

I'm trying to use a data source of an existing S3 bucket like this:
data "aws_s3_bucket" "src-config-bucket" {
bucket = "single-word-name" }
And Terraform always fails the plan stage with the message:
Error: UnauthorizedOperation: You are not authorized to perform this operation.
status code: 403, request id: XXXXX
The requests failing can be viewed with the following info in the results:
{
"eventVersion": "1.08",
"userIdentity": {
​​
"type": "IAMUser",
"principalId": "ANONYMIZED",
"arn": "arn:aws:iam::1234567890:user/terraformops",
"accountId": "123456789012",
"accessKeyId": "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX",
"userName": "terraformops"
}​​,
"eventTime": "2021-02-02T18:12:19Z",
"eventSource": "s3.amazonaws.com",
"eventName": "GetBucketWebsite",
"awsRegion": "eu-west-1",
"sourceIPAddress": "X.Y.Z.W",
"userAgent": "[aws-sdk-go/1.36.28 (go1.15.5; linux; amd64) APN/1.0 HashiCorp/1.0 Terraform/0.14.4 (+https://www.terraform.io)]",
"errorCode": "NoSuchWebsiteConfiguration",
"errorMessage": "The specified bucket does not have a website configuration",
"requestParameters": {
​​
"bucketName": "s3-bucket-name",
"website": "",
"Host": "s3-bucket-name.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com"
}
Why can't I use an existing S3 bucket as a data source within Terraform ? I don't treat it as a website anywhere in the terraform project so I don't know why it asks the server the GetBucketWebsite call and fail. Hope someone can help.
Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't know why it asks the server the GetBucketWebsite call and fail.
It asks GetBucketWebsite as data source aws_s3_bucket returns this information by providing website_endpoint and website_domain.
So you need to have permissions to call this action on the bucket. The error message suggests that the IAM user/role which you use for querying the bucket does not have all permissions to get needed information.