Streaming

rpk topic delete

Delete one or more Kafka topics.

This command deletes all requested topics, printing the success or fail status per topic.

The --regex flag (-r) opts into parsing the input topics as regular expressions and deleting any non-internal topic that matches any of the expressions. Each expression is wrapped with ^ and $, so it must match a whole topic name rather than part of one. Anchoring does not make broad expressions safe: .* still matches, and deletes, every non-internal topic.

The topic list command accepts the same input regex format as this delete command. To check what your regular expressions will delete before actually deleting them, check the output of rpk topic list -r.

Deleting a topic is irreversible and removes all data in the topic.

Usage

rpk topic delete <topics...> [flags]

Examples

This section provides examples of how to use rpk topic delete.

Delete specific topics

Delete topics foo and bar

rpk topic delete foo bar

Delete with regex

Delete topics starting with 'f' or ending in 'r'

rpk topic delete -r '^f.*' '.*r$'

Delete all topics (use with caution)

rpk topic delete -r '.*'

Flags

Value Type Description

--format

string

Output format (json,yaml,text,wide,help). (New in v26.2.1)

-r, --regex

bool

Treat topic names as regular expressions and delete all matching topics. Use with caution.

Global flags

Value Type Description

--config

string

Redpanda or rpk config file; default search paths are ~/.config/rpk/rpk.yaml, $PWD/redpanda.yaml, and /etc/redpanda/redpanda.yaml.

-X, --config-opt

stringArray

Override rpk configuration settings; -X help for detail or -X list for terser detail.

--ignore-profile

bool

Ignore rpk.yaml and redpanda.yaml; use default settings.

--profile

string

rpk profile to use.

-v, --verbose

bool

Enable verbose logging.