It took me quite a while to figure out how to set lifecycle rules. If you look at the code, it's undocumented:

@lifecycle_rules.setter
def lifecycle_rules(self, rules):
    self._patch_property('lifecycle', {'rule': rules})

I found some tests for this, but even those don't seem to use the lifecycle_rules method. Not having a documented method for doing this is very frustrating since this is supposed to be a library that supports all of the features.