At NYC Camp this past weekend, I heard several requests for such a feature. It's been referred to in other issues before, such as #1611536: Site cannot be deleted after failed install. It can be a major AegirWTF. Currently, the manual process of removing the cruft left over from partially-installed or partially-deleted sites is a form of tribal knowledge passed on through IRC, and in the documentation. We should endeavour to find a way to automate (at least parts of) this procedure.

This should be considered an unsafe task, and require a confirmation dialog. It should also (optionally) only appear in the task list when there's already indication that something is broken about the site. For example, a failed install or delete task. We should be fault-tolerant, so that the purge task itself doesn't fail if it cannot accomplish a given step. But it should definitely give feedback if it can't remove something. For example, say a site failed to delete because there are files that are owned by 'www-data', and that 'aegir' doesn't have permission to delete. In such a case, we should throw a warning into the task log indicating what manual intervention may be required to complete the purge.

Similarly, we should provide such a 'purge' ('force delete' would also be a reasonable name) task for platforms.

The steps required are detailed in the wiki pages I've linked to above.

Comments

dman’s picture

As a sidebar to this, I really need a 'delete now' (without backups) button.

Currently, the system takes a full backup when I press 'disable' and another backup when I press 'delete'.
With a site > 2GB of files etc, this eats my server for a long time doing gzips that I don't want because the thing I'm trying to garbage-collect was just a trial or a redundant copy. The reason I'm deleting is to try and *save space* and clean up.
If that need will be encompassed within the 'purge' task, so much the better.

PascalAnimateur’s picture

Any progress on this? It's really annoying having to manually delete the sites / platforms...

ergonlogic’s picture

I've begun work on this over in hosting_dev.module: #2615554: Add platform and site 'purge' tasks

Jon Pugh’s picture

Jon Pugh’s picture

Status: Active » Needs work

I didn't realize the purge tasks were created in that other module.

I definitely agree they should be added to aegir core.