How to purge CouchDB documents

4
votes

I need to fully delete, as in Purge, several documents from CouchDB version 2.1.

I have been reading about /db/_purge on docs.couchdb.org, but the process is not clear to me. There is a sentence "The format of the request must include the document ID and one or more revisions that must be purged".

How do I do this in Postman or in a browser? Do I actually enclose my doc _id & rev(s) in braces? I am struggling with how to correctly format a _purge request.

3
couchdb

3 Answers

3
votes

As of now, it is my understanding that _purge does not work in 2.0 and 2.1.

For more information look at this JIRA post.

2
votes

Note that document purging is only supported in CouchDB versions prior to 2.0, and from 2.3 onward. Early versions of clustered CouchDB (2.0.x and 2.1.x) did not support purging, although this was poorly documented!

The documentation explains, and provides an example:

{
    "c6114c65e295552ab1019e2b046b10e": [
        "3-b06fcd1c1c9e0ec7c480ee8aa467bf3b",
        "3-0e871ef78849b0c206091f1a7af6ec41"
    ]
}

So that means in the format of:

{
    "<doc id>": [
        "<rev>",
        "<rev>"
    ]
}

This should be the body of your HTTP request, with a Content-Type of application/json. You won't be able to do that in a browser, without using JavaScript.

With curl it would look like:

curl -X POST http://<server url>/<database>/_purge -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"<doc id>":["<rev1>","<rev2>"]}'
0
votes

I just wrote this tool to purge and compact databases in CouchDB. https://github.com/nisbus/couch_db_cleaner
I hope the documentation in the README is clear and it helps.