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
Comment #1
dman CreditAttribution: dman commentedAs 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.
Comment #2
PascalAnimateur CreditAttribution: PascalAnimateur commentedAny progress on this? It's really annoying having to manually delete the sites / platforms...
Comment #3
ergonlogicI've begun work on this over in hosting_dev.module: #2615554: Add platform and site 'purge' tasks
Comment #4
Jon PughComment #5
Jon PughI didn't realize the purge tasks were created in that other module.
I definitely agree they should be added to aegir core.