README

Delete content in bulk, and keep the site clean afterwards.

Nuke does two related jobs for Craft 5. A strike deletes a deliberately chosen set of content — a section, a volume, a user group — together with its drafts, revisions and relations. A sweep is the recurring housekeeping pass: unreferenced assets, orphaned rows, expired backups and logs, temp files, and Craft's own garbage collection.

Both are built around the same idea: nothing is deleted until you have seen exactly what would be.

The guardrails

A plugin that deletes things in bulk should arrive configured to hesitate.

Every strike is previewed first. The preview and the execution share one code path and one resolved list of element IDs, so what the preview counts is what the strike deletes. It is not an estimate.
The preview shows collateral. Elements that are not being deleted but hold a relation to something that is — those are the fields that silently empty out, and they are the reason a bulk deletion goes wrong quietly rather than loudly.
A typed confirmation arms the button. By default you type the handle of the thing you are deleting. The point isn't that typing is hard; it's that it can't happen by accident, by a double-click, or by a browser restoring a form on back-navigation.
A database backup is taken first, named after the run, and linked from the run record. If the backup fails, nothing is deleted.
Soft delete by default. Elements go to Craft's trash and stay recoverable. Permanent deletion is a separate permission.
A ceiling on how much one run may touch — 10,000 elements out of the box. A mis-scoped strike fails loudly at the preview instead of quietly at 200,000 rows.
Protected scopes can never be targeted, whatever the form says.
Everything is recorded — in a run ledger, and in storage/logs/nuke.log, which survives the database it was deleting from.

What a strike can target

Entries, categories, tags, assets and users. Each narrowed by source (section, volume, group), entry type, site, status, age, search, or an explicit list of IDs.

Other element types can register themselves through Scopes::EVENT_REGISTER_SCOPES — see docs/EXTENDING.md.

Deleting an element takes its drafts and revisions with it either way; Nuke counts them so the numbers in the report are the truth, and can optionally remove them outright rather than leaving them soft-deleted.

What a sweep cleans up

Twenty-three tasks, each with its own window, each opted out of individually.

Content — trashed elements past your own window; abandoned and autosave drafts; revisions beyond the newest few per element (Craft only applies maxRevisions when an element is saved, so lowering it never catches up with content nobody edits); unreferenced assets; empty asset folders.

Database — relations pointing at deleted elements; stale search index rows; draft change tracking; element activity; deprecation warnings; failed queue jobs; stale login sessions; expired tokens; announcements; asset-indexing leftovers; orphaned transform records; bulk-operation records.

Files — old database backups; rotated logs; temp and scratch files; compiled templates; config and Composer backups.

Craft — Craft's own garbage collector, run last so it picks up everything the rest orphaned.

The unreferenced-assets task is the one that cannot be certain, and it is built around that fact: it checks relations and reference tags in element content, it reports rather than deletes by default, and the strongest thing it will ever do is move an asset to the trash.

Editions

Lite is everything above: strikes with the full preview and every guardrail, manual sweeps, the run ledger, permissions, and the console commands.

Pro adds scheduled sweeps and emailed reports.

From the console

# What can I aim at?
php craft nuke/strike/scopes

# What would this delete? (--dry-run is on by default)
php craft nuke/strike/fire entries --sources=news --updated-before="-2 years"

# Actually delete it.
php craft nuke/strike/fire entries --sources=news --updated-before="-2 years" --dry-run=0 --force

# Housekeeping.
php craft nuke/sweep/list
php craft nuke/sweep/run                 # scan
php craft nuke/sweep/run --dry-run=0     # sweep
php craft nuke/sweep/due --dry-run=0     # sweep, but only if the schedule says it's owed

--dry-run defaults to on everywhere in the console. A command that deletes by default is a command that deletes when someone runs it to see what the arguments are.

For cron, either let cron own the schedule:

0 3 * * * cd /path/to/site && php craft nuke/sweep/run --dry-run=0

…or let Nuke own it and have cron just ask (Pro):

*/15 * * * * cd /path/to/site && php craft nuke/sweep/due --dry-run=0

Permissions

Permission	What it allows
`nuke:view`	The dashboard, previews and the run ledger
`nuke:sweep`	Running housekeeping sweeps
`nuke:strike`	Deleting content
`nuke:hardDelete`	Bypassing the trash

nuke:view deliberately does not include nuke:strike. Seeing what a deletion would do is a reasonable thing to grant widely; doing it is not.

Requirements

Craft CMS 5.3 or later, PHP 8.2 or later. No runtime dependencies beyond Craft.

Installation

composer require justinholtweb/craft-nuke
php craft plugin/install nuke

Extending

Custom scopes, custom sweepers, and events around both — docs/EXTENDING.md.

Licence

The Craft License. See LICENSE.md.

justinholtweb / craft-nuke

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