DELETE request method

Syntax
Examples
Successfully deleting a resource
Specifications
Browser compatibility
See also

The DELETE HTTP method asks the server to delete a specified resource.

Requests using DELETE should only be used to delete data and shouldn't contain a body.

[!NOTE] The semantics of sending a message body in DELETE requests are undefined. Some servers may reject the request with a 4XX client error response.

Request has body	No
Successful response has body	May
{{Glossary("Safe/HTTP", "Safe")}}	No
{{Glossary("Idempotent")}}	Yes
{{Glossary("Cacheable")}}	No
Allowed in HTML forms	No

Syntax

DELETE <request-target>["?"<query>] HTTP/1.1

<request-target>
- : Identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the {{HTTPHeader("Host")}} header. This is an absolute path (e.g., /path/to/file.html) in requests to an origin server, and an absolute URL in requests to proxies (e.g., http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html).
<query> {{optional_inline}}
- : An optional query component preceded by a question-mark ?. Often used to carry identifying information in the form of key=value pairs.

Examples

Successfully deleting a resource

The following request asks the server to delete the resource file.html:

DELETE /file.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

If the request is successful, there are several possible successful response status codes. A {{HTTPStatus("204", "204 No Content")}} response means the request was successful and no additional information needs to be sent back to the client:

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Wed, 04 Sep 2024 10:16:04 GMT

A {{HTTPStatus("200", "200 OK")}} response means the request was successful and the response body includes a representation describing the outcome:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2024 14:18:33 GMT
Content-Length: 1234

<html lang="en-US">
  <body>
    <h1>File "file.html" deleted.</h1>
  </body>
</html>

A {{HTTPStatus("202", "202 Accepted")}} response means the request has been accepted and will probably succeed, but the resource has not yet been deleted by the server.

HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Date: Wed, 26 Jun 2024 12:00:00 GMT
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 1234

<html lang="en-US">
  <body>
    <h1>Deletion of "file.html" accepted.</h1>
    <p>See <a href="http://example.com/tasks/123/status">the status monitor</a> for details.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Specifications

Browser compatibility