Delete an RO-Crate

DELETE 
/ro-crate/:id

Optional core — provided when deposit.supported is true. See the Deposits guide.

Delete an RO-Crate — its metadata document and files. Deletion is not a deposit session; it is already atomic. Implementations needing slow teardown MAY return 202 Accepted.

The spec mandates no preconditions; implementations MAY refuse per their own policy (curatorial holds, cross-references) with 409 and a reason. The effect on materialised entities is implementation-defined, mirroring re-deposit pruning: an entity no other RO-Crate contributes to MAY be removed, and deliberate retention is legitimate. An entity with other contributors survives — the deleted RO-Crate simply drops out of its roCrateIds.

Open deposits do not block deletion: delete wins, and a subsequent finalise of such a deposit fails back to open with the failure recorded. Implementations MAY auto-abort open deposits against the deleted RO-Crate.

After deletion, the RO-Crate's URIs (including /ro-crate/{id}/metadata) follow the implementation's declared tombstonePolicy.

Request

Responses

202

Accepted - deletion is proceeding asynchronously

204

RO-Crate deleted

401

Not authenticated

403

Access token does not have the required scope

404

RO-Crate not found

409

Conflict - the implementation refuses the deletion per its own policy; the body carries the reason

410

Gone - the resource has been deleted. Returned in place of 404 when the implementation declares a tombstonePolicy of "410"; the body is a tombstone describing the deletion. Under a tombstonePolicy of "404", deleted resources return 404 instead.

429

Rate limit exceeded

Response Headers

X-RateLimit-Limit

Request limit per time window

X-RateLimit-Remaining

Requests remaining in current time window

X-RateLimit-Reset

Unix timestamp when the rate limit resets

Retry-After

Number of seconds to wait before retrying

500

Internal Server Error