folio delete

folio delete <SHEET> --actor <actor> --ids <id1,id2,...>

Deletes the listed records. The whole row is removed; provenance lines referring to the deleted primary key remain in provenance.jsonl (the log is append-only — deletes don’t get to rewrite history).

Example

$ folio delete ./customers --actor agent:human --ids cust_998,cust_999
{"deleted": 2, "remaining": 5}

Behaviour

• IDs that aren’t in records.jsonl are silently skipped (no error).
• The write is atomic and single-writer (same as upsert).
• No x-editable-by check (the attribute is per-field; delete is per-row).

If you need a soft-delete, add a deleted: boolean field on the contract and use upsert to flip it. Real deletes are useful for cleaning up test fixtures and removing rows that should never have existed.

Auditability after delete

The append-only provenance.jsonl keeps every line ever written for the deleted primary keys. So you can answer “what did cust_998 look like before we deleted it?” by reading the audit log:

grep '"record_id":"cust_998"' provenance.jsonl

The data values themselves are gone, but the provenance — who wrote what and when — remains.

Errors

Error	What it means
OperationError: --ids is required	You forgot --ids.
LockTimeoutError: failed to acquire .lock within 30s	Another writer is in progress.

See also

• folio upsert — write the inverse operation.
• folio provenance — inspect the trail of a deleted record.