How to delete a contact through the command line (CLI)

Question

How can I delete a contact through the command line?

Answer 1

If you're on Drupal and have drush installed you can do

drush cvapi Contact.delete id=17 skip_undelete=1

Answer 2

On the command line, type php path/to/civicrm/bin/cli.php -e Contact -a delete --output --contact_id=17 (Note: passing a contact_id is mandatory when deleting. But you can delete multiple contacts by creating a php file that has a loop and executes the above command through exec().)

If you want to permanently delete a contact, add the skip_undelete parameter as well: php path/to/civicrm/bin/cli.php -e Contact -a delete --output --contact_id=17 --skip_undelete=true

I was, however, having problems with permanent deleting. I was just getting the error Could not delete contact. Looking at the code, my suspicion proved right - it was a permissions issue. So I tried to pass my admin CMS user login credentials: php path/to/civicrm/bin/cli.php -e Contact -a delete -u myuser -p mypass --output --contact_id=17 --skip_undelete=true. Unfortunately, for some reason it didn't work for me. Anyways, I thought I'd share my experiences - maybe I'm missing something or it might work for someone else. To circumvent this, in my case I just temporarily commented out the permissions check in CRM_Contact_BAO_Contact->deleteContact().

Tip: because the delete isn't very fast, if you are deleting a large number of contacts it might take quite a while to go through them. The little trick I used to speed this up was to start multiple instances of my shell and have each of them delete a portion of my contacts. In that case I found it more convenient to use a bash for loop, like so: for i in {50000..100000}; do php cli.php -e Contact -a delete --output --contact_id=$i --skip_undelete=true; echo Deleted contact_id $i; done