How to recursively delete collection in firestore?

Question

I needed a way to quickly clear an entire firestore DB but couldn't find great documentation for how to do it. Eventually I found on stack overflow this answer (Clear Firestore database of all data?) but was a bit nervous about how long it would take to clear my entire DB of millions of documents, so I want a way to just recursively delete a collection at a time.

Background: I've been running some tests migrating large amounts of data from an old DB to firestore, and after each run I want a clean slate to work with in firestore. Do NOT use this on production data!

Answer 1

This is now documented via recursiveDelete function:

• https://googleapis.dev/nodejs/firestore/latest/Firestore.html#recursiveDelete

Note that this is a relatively new feature, so you need to make sure your Firebase libraries are updated.

// Setup
const admin = require('firebase-admin');
const serviceAccount = require("./files/my-file.json");
admin.initializeApp({
  credential: admin.credential.cert(serviceAccount)
});
const firestore = admin.firestore();

// Delete
const documentRef = firestore
      .collection("users")
      .doc("M3S2iPhsiu2ZQmOK8ZcC");
await firestore.recursiveDelete(documentRef);

Answer 2

I was able to do this by running the firestore cli delete command, specifying each collection by path. Make sure not to start the path with a leading slash, or it will think you are referring to a directory on your computer. Example of how to run:

firebase firestore:delete "path/to/collection" --recursive

The firestore:delete command is sort of documented here as well: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/delete-data#delete_data_with_the_firebase_cli

Update Please note that the command may fail after deleting about 20000 documents. I think it might be a limit it hits. I just re-run with the same collection path a few times to fully delete collections that are larger than 20k docs.

Answer 3

From the Fireship website : https://fireship.io/snippets/delete-firestore-collection/ there is 2 options to delete collections in firestore :

Option 1 : You can manually delete a collection or subcollection from the Firebase Console OR by using the CLI :

firebase firestore:delete path-to-delete

Option 2 :

It is possible to interact with Firebase Tools from a Cloud Function. This works especially well with Callable functions because you most certainly want to enforce some form of user authorization. First, obtain CI token to authenticate firebase tools.

cd functions
npm i firebase-tools -D

firebase login:ci
# your_token

firebase functions:config:set ci_token='your_token'

The function should validate the user has permission to run the operation. If allowed, it runs the CLI command recursively on the collection and its nested subcollections.

const project = process.env.GCLOUD_PROJECT;
const token = functions.config().ci_token;

exports.deleteCollection = functions.runWith({ timeoutSeconds: 540})
  .https.onCall((data, context) => {

  const path = data.path;
  const allowed = context.auth.uid === path.split('/')[0]; // TODO your own logic

if (!allowed) {
  throw new functions.https.HttpsError(
    'permission-denied',
    'Hey, that is not cool buddy!'
  );
}

return firebase_tools.firestore
  .delete(path, {
    project,
    token,
    recursive: true,
    yes: true,
  })
  .then(() => ({ result: 'all done!' }));
});