Removing things

This document clarifies the various Juju commands that can be used to remove things, as well as a couple of options that can be used to force a removal.

Contents:

Removal terms

There is a distinction between the similar sounding commands unregister, detach, remove, destroy, and kill. These commands are ordered such that their effect increases in severity:

  • Unregister means to decouple a resource from a logical entity for the client. The effect is local to the client only and does not affect the logical entity in any way.

  • Detach means to decouple a resource from a logical entity (such as an application). The resource will remain available and the underlying cloud resources used by it also remain in place.

  • Remove means to cleanly remove a single logical entity. This is a destructive process, meaning the entity will no longer be available via Juju, and any underlying cloud resources used by it will be freed (however, this can often be overridden on a case-by-case basis to leave the underlying cloud resources in place).

  • Destroy means to cleanly tear down a logical entity, along with everything within these entities. This is a very destructive process.

  • Kill means to forcibly tear down an unresponsive logical entity, along with everything within it. This is a very destructive process that does not guarantee associated resources are cleaned up.

These command terms/prefixes do not apply to all commands in a generic way. The explanations above are merely intended to convey how a command generally operates and what its severity level is.

Forcing removals

Juju object removal commands do not succeed when there are errors in the multiple steps that are required to remove the underlying object. For instance, a unit will not remove properly if it has a hook error, or a model cannot be removed if application units are in an error state. This is an intentionally conservative approach to the deletion of things.

However, this policy can also be a source of frustration for users in certain situations (i.e. “I don’t care, I just want my model gone!”). Because of this, several commands have a --force option.

Furthermore, even when utilising the --force option, the process may take more time than an administrator is willing to accept (i.e. “Just go away as quickly as possible!”). Because of this, several commands that support the --force option have, in addition, support for a --no-wait option.

Caution:

The --force and --no-wait options should be regarded as tools to wield as a last resort. Using them introduces a chance of associated parts (e.g., relations) not being cleaned up, which can lead to future problems.

As of v.2.6.1, this is the state of affairs for those commands that support at least the --force option:

command --force --no-wait
destroy-model yes yes
detach-storage yes no
remove-application yes yes
remove-machine yes yes
remove-offer yes no
remove-relation yes no
remove-storage yes no
remove-unit yes yes

When a command has --force but not --no-wait, this means that the combination of those options simply does not apply.

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