Delete Documents

Overview

In this section, we show you how to call the write operations to remove documents from a collection in your MongoDB database.

Delete

If you want to remove existing documents from a collection, you can use deleteOne() to remove one document or deleteMany() for one or more documents. These methods accept a query document that matches the documents you want to delete.

You can specify the document or documents to be deleted by the deleteOne() or deleteMany() write operations in a JSON object as follows:

const doc = {
  pageViews: {
    $gt: 10,
    $lt: 32768
  }
};

To delete the first matching document using the deleteOne() method or to delete all matching documents using the deleteMany() method, pass the document as the method parameter:

const deleteResult = await collection.deleteOne(doc);
const deleteManyResult = await collection.deleteMany(doc);

You can print the number of documents deleted by the operation by accessing the deletedCount field of the result for each of the method calls above as follows:

console.dir(deleteResult.deletedCount);
console.dir(deleteManyResult.deletedCount);

Upon successful delete, these statements should print the number of documents deleted by the associated operation.

For fully runnable examples and additional information on the available options, see our usage examples for deleteOne() and deleteMany().