MongoDB Delete Document

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In this post, we will learn how to delete a document using MongoDB.

Delete Methods

MongoDB provides the following methods to delete documents of a collection:

• db.collection.deleteOne() - Delete at most a single document that match a specified filter even though multiple documents may match the specified filter.
• db.collection.deleteMany() - Delete all documents that match a specified filter.
• db.collection.remove() - Delete a single document or all documents that match a specified filter.

The examples on this page use the posts collection. To populate the posts collection, run the following:

db.posts.insertMany([ { title: 'MongoDB Overview', description: 'MongoDB is no sql database', by: 'Java Guides', url: 'https://javaguides.net', tags: ['mongodb', 'database', 'NoSQL'], likes: 100 }, { title: 'NoSQL Database', description: "NoSQL database doesn't have tables", by: 'Java Guides', url: 'https://javaguides.net', tags: ['mongodb', 'database', 'NoSQL'], likes: 20, comments: [ { user:'user1', message: 'My first comment', dateCreated: new Date(2013,11,10,2,35), like: 0 } ] } ]); { "acknowledged" : true, "insertedIds" : [ ObjectId("5e18246f7695f4d696a05985"), ObjectId("5e18246f7695f4d696a05986") ] }

Delete All Documents

To delete all documents from a collection, pass an empty filter document {} to the db.collection.deleteMany() method.

The following example deletes all documents from the inventory collection:

db.posts.deleteMany({}) 

The method returns a document with the status of the operation.

Delete Only One Document that Matches a Condition

To delete at most a single document that matches a specified filter (even though multiple documents may match the specified filter) use the db.collection.deleteOne() method.

The following example deletes the first document where the title is "MongoDB Overview":

db.posts.deleteOne( { title: "MongoDB Overview" } )

Delete All Documents that Match a Condition

You can specify criteria, or filters, that identify the documents to delete. The filters use the same syntax as read operations.

To specify equality conditions, use : expressions in the query filter document:

{ <field1>: <value1>, ... } 

A query filter document can use the query operators to specify conditions in the following form:

{ <field1>: { <operator1>: <value1> }, ... } 

To delete all documents that match deletion criteria, pass a filter parameter to the deleteMany() method.

The following example removes all documents from the inventory collection where the status field equals "A":

db.inventory.deleteMany({ by : "Java Guides" }) 

The method returns a document with the status of the operation.

Summary

The below diagram shows the summary of all the commands used in this post: