fluree drop

Hard-drop an entire ledger (every branch under the name) or a graph source.

Usage

fluree drop <NAME> --force

Arguments

Argument	Description
<NAME>	Ledger name (bare, e.g. mydb) or graph source name. Branch-qualified ledger ids (including mydb:main) are rejected — use fluree branch drop <branch> --ledger mydb to drop a single branch.

Options

Option	Description
--force	Required flag to confirm deletion

Description

Hard-drops a whole ledger — every branch under the name, including any retracted-but-not-purged branches, plus the cross-branch @shared/dicts/ namespace. Branches are dropped leaf-first so partial failure leaves orphan parents rather than dangling children. Equivalent to POST /drop with "hard": true. Deleted artifacts are irreversible.

The command first tries to drop the name as a ledger. If no nameservice record exists for the name, it tries to drop it as a graph source. This means fluree drop works uniformly for both ledgers and graph sources like Iceberg mappings.

The --force flag is required to prevent accidental deletion. There is no CLI soft-drop flag; use the HTTP or Rust API if you need to retract a ledger while preserving artifacts. To remove a single branch (not the whole ledger), use fluree branch drop.

Graph source cleanup is implementation-specific. The command retracts the graph source record and performs any available hard-drop cleanup for that graph source type; warnings are printed when cleanup is partial.

Examples

# Drop the whole "oldledger" ledger (all branches + @shared/dicts/)
fluree drop oldledger --force

# Drop a graph source (Iceberg mapping)
fluree drop warehouse-orders --force

Output

Ledger:

Dropped ledger 'oldledger'

Ledger with artifact cleanup:

Dropped ledger 'oldledger' (deleted 73 artifacts across 3 branches)

Graph source:

Dropped graph source 'warehouse-orders:main'

Errors

Without --force:

error: use --force to confirm deletion of 'oldledger'

Branch-qualified input with a non-default suffix:

error: drop_ledger drops the whole ledger and does not accept a non-default
       branch suffix 'dev'. Use drop_branch("mydb", "dev") to drop a single
       branch, or pass "mydb" to drop the whole ledger.

Dropping a single named graph

To drop just one named graph inside a ledger (without removing the ledger, the branch, or any other graph), use fluree graph drop:

# Drop one named graph (active ledger, default branch)
fluree graph drop urn:example:org/payroll

# Drop on a specific ledger / branch
fluree graph drop urn:example:org/payroll --ledger mydb
fluree graph drop http://example.org/graphs/scratch --ledger mydb:feature-x

# Drop via a tracked remote server
fluree graph drop urn:example:org/payroll --ledger mydb --remote origin

Unlike fluree drop, fluree graph drop is transactional and history- preserving: it produces a normal commit at t = current + 1 whose flakes retract every triple currently asserted in the graph, leaves the graph IRI registered (so subsequent inserts land in the same graph slot), and lets queries as-of an earlier t still see the dropped data.

The graph IRI must be an absolute IRI (e.g. urn:..., http://...). The default graph and the system graphs (urn:fluree:{ledger_id}#txn-meta and urn:fluree:{ledger_id}#config) cannot be dropped.

To see what graphs exist on a ledger, use fluree graph list (or look at the named-graphs section of fluree info <ledger>).

See Also

• create - Create a new ledger
• iceberg - Map Iceberg tables as graph sources
• list - List all ledgers and graph sources