Hey. So if only I had a cake for every customer that asked if we could delete all of their cloud files in a single container for them (i’d be really really really fat so maybe that is a bad idea). A dollar though, now there’s a thought.

On that note, here is a dollar. Probably the best dollar you’ll see today. You could probably do this with php, bash or swiftly, but doing it *THIS* way is also awesome, and I learnt (although some might say learned) something. Here is how I did it. I should also importantly thank Matt Dorn for his contributions to this article. Without him this wouldn’t exist.

Step 1. Install Python, pip

yum install python pip
apt-get install python pip

Step 2. Install Pyrax (rackspace Python Openstack Library)

pip install pyrax

Step 3. Install Libevent

curl -L -O https://github.com/downloads/libevent/libevent/libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
tar xzf libevent-2.0.21-stable.tar.gz
cd libevent-2.0.21-stable
./configure --prefix="$VIRTUAL_ENV"
make && make install
cd $VIRTUAL_ENV/..

Step 4. Install Greenlet and Gevent

pip install greenlet
pip install gevent

Step 5. Check gevent library loading in Python Shell

python
import gevent

If nothing comes back, the gevent lib works OK.

Step 6. Create the code to delete all the files

#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from gevent import monkey
from gevent.pool import Pool
from gevent import Timeout
monkey.patch_all()
import pyrax

if __name__ == '__main__':
    pool = Pool(100)
pyrax.set_setting('identity_type', 'rackspace')
pyrax.set_setting('verify_ssl', False)
# Rackspace Credentials Go here, Region LON, username: mycloudusername apikey: myrackspaceapikey. 
pyrax.set_setting('region', 'LON')
pyrax.set_credentials('mycloudusername', 'myrackspaceapikey')

cf = pyrax.cloudfiles
# Remember to set the container correctly (which container to delete all files within?)
container = cf.get_container('testing')
objects = container.get_objects(full_listing=True)


def delete_object(obj):

# added timeout of 5 seconds just in case

    with Timeout(5, False):
        try:
            obj.delete()
        except:
            pass


for obj in objects:
    pool.spawn(delete_object, obj)
pool.join()

It’s well worth noting that this can also be used to list all of the objects as well, but that is something for later…

Step 7. Execute (not me the script!)

The timeout can be adjusted. And the script can be run several times to ensure any missed files are retried to be deleted.