GCP: Deleting Project with Lien… Quickly

PROBLEM

The whole idea of placing a lien on a project is to prevent accidental deletion.

But, sometimes it’s a little pain in the ass to attempt a project deletion in GCP Console only to find out a lien was set, especially during the development phase.

Then, we grumpily open up Cloud Shell and run a series of commands to delete the project.

SOLUTION

To play fast and loose in the name of Shitty Agile, create a script called delete-project.sh with the following content:-

#!/bin/bash

set -e

project_id="$1"

gcloud config set project "${project_id}"

lien_id=$(gcloud alpha resource-manager liens list --format=json | jq -r '.[0] .name' | sed -e 's/liens\///g')

[[ "${lien_id}" != "null" ]] && gcloud alpha resource-manager liens delete "${lien_id}"

gcloud projects delete "${project_id}" --quiet

This script will delete a project regardless the existence of lien.

From Cloud Shell, run this bad boy:-

./delete-project.sh [PROJECT_ID]