Delete Container

The Delete Container operation marks the specified container for deletion. The container and any blobs contained within it are later deleted during garbage collection.

Request

You can construct the Delete Container request as follows. HTTPS is recommended. Replace myaccount with the name of your storage account.

Method Request URI HTTP version
DELETE https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?restype=container HTTP/1.1

Emulated storage service URI

When you make a request against the emulated storage service, specify the emulator hostname and Azure Blob Storage port as 127.0.0.1:10000, followed by the emulated storage account name.

Method Request URI HTTP version
DELETE http://127.0.0.1:10000/devstoreaccount1/mycontainer?restype=container HTTP/1.1

For more information, see Use Azurite emulator for local Azure Storage development.

URI parameters

You can specify the following additional parameter on the request URI.

Parameter Description
timeout Optional. The timeout parameter is expressed in seconds. For more information, see Setting timeouts for Blob Storage operations.

Request headers

The following table describes required and optional request headers.

Request header Description
Authorization Required. Specifies the authorization scheme, account name, and signature. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
Date or x-ms-date Required. Specifies the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for the request. For more information, see Authorize requests to Azure Storage.
x-ms-lease-id: <ID> Required for version 2012-02-12 and later if the container has an active lease. To call Delete Container on a container that has an active lease, specify the lease ID in this header. If this header isn't specified when there is an active lease, Delete Container returns a 409 (Conflict) error. If you specify the wrong lease ID, or a lease ID on a container that doesn't have an active lease, Delete Container returns a 412 (Precondition failed) error.
x-ms-version Required for all authorized requests. Specifies the version of the operation to use for this request. For more information, see Versioning for the Azure Storage services.
x-ms-client-request-id Optional. Provides a client-generated, opaque value with a 1-kibibyte (KiB) character limit that's recorded in the logs when logging is configured. We highly recommend that you use this header to correlate client-side activities with requests that the server receives. For more information, see Monitor Azure Blob Storage.

This operation also supports the use of conditional headers to delete the container only if a specified condition is met. For more information, see Specifying conditional headers for Blob Storage operations.

Request body

None.

Sample request

Request Syntax:  
DELETE https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer?restype=container HTTP/1.1  
  
Request Headers:  
x-ms-version: 2011-08-18  
x-ms-date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:44:34 GMT  
Authorization: SharedKey devstoreaccount1:t7mf5htNuwLFX9g0S2LDdRtRn1FQzMAluBvHy1QPpnM=  

Response

The response includes an HTTP status code and a set of response headers.

Status code

A successful operation returns status code 202 (Accepted). For information about status codes, see Status and error codes.

Response headers

The response for this operation includes the following headers. The response can also include additional, standard HTTP headers. All standard headers conform to the HTTP/1.1 protocol specification.

Response header Description
x-ms-request-id This header uniquely identifies the request that was made, and can be used for troubleshooting the request. For more information, see Troubleshooting API operations.
x-ms-version Indicates the version of Blob Storage used to run the request. This header is returned for requests made against version 2009-09-19 and later.
Date A UTC date/time value that indicates the time at which the response was initiated. The service generates this value.
x-ms-client-request-id You can use this header to troubleshoot requests and corresponding responses. The value of this header is equal to the value of the x-ms-client-request-id header, if it's present in the request. The value is at most 1,024 visible ASCII characters. If the x-ms-client-request-id header isn't present in the request, this header won't be present in the response.

Response body

None.

Sample response

Response Status:  
HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted  
  
Response Headers:  
Transfer-Encoding: chunked  
Content-Type: application/xml  
Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 21:45:00 GMT  
x-ms-version: 2011-08-18  
Server: Windows-Azure-Blob/1.0 Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0  

Authorization

Authorization is required when calling any data access operation in Azure Storage. You can authorize the Delete Container operation as described below.

Azure Storage supports using Microsoft Entra ID to authorize requests to blob data. With Microsoft Entra ID, you can use Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) to grant permissions to a security principal. The security principal may be a user, group, application service principal, or Azure managed identity. The security principal is authenticated by Microsoft Entra ID to return an OAuth 2.0 token. The token can then be used to authorize a request against the Blob service.

To learn more about authorization using Microsoft Entra ID, see Authorize access to blobs using Microsoft Entra ID.

Permissions

Listed below are the RBAC action necessary for a Microsoft Entra user, group, or service principal to call the Delete Container operation, and the least privileged built-in Azure RBAC role that includes this action:

To learn more about assigning roles using Azure RBAC, see Assign an Azure role for access to blob data.

Remarks

When a container is deleted, a container with the same name can't be created for at least 30 seconds. The container might not be available for more than 30 seconds if the service is still processing the request. While the container is being deleted, attempts to create a container of the same name fail with status code 409 (Conflict). The service indicates that the container is being deleted. All other operations, including operations on any blobs under the container, fail with status code 404 (Not Found) while the container is being deleted.

Billing

Storage accounts are not charged for Delete Container requests.

See also

Status and error codes
Blob Storage error codes
Specifying conditional headers for Blob Storage operations