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How to Delete Domains

Validated on 21 May 2024 • Last edited on 17 Apr 2025

Adding a domain you own to your DigitalOcean account lets you manage the domain’s DNS records with the control panel and API. Domains you manage on DigitalOcean integrate with DigitalOcean Load Balancers and Spaces to streamline automatic SSL certificate management.

If you no longer want to use DigitalOcean to manage your domain’s DNS records, you can delete the domain. This removes the domain and its DNS records from your current team. It does not cancel the domain registration because your domain is managed by the registrar you purchased it from.

To delete a domain that is associated with a Let’s Encrypt certificate, you must first delete the certificate and reconfigure anything that used the certificate, like load balancer SSL termination or custom Spaces CDN endpoints.

Delete a Domain Using Automation

How to Delete a Domain Using the DigitalOcean CLI

Install doctl, the official DigitalOcean CLI.
Create a personal access token and save it for use with doctl.
Use the token to grant doctl access to your DigitalOcean account.
```
doctl auth init
```
Finally, run doctl compute domain delete. Basic usage looks like this, but you can read the usage docs for more details:
```
doctl compute domain delete <domain> [flags]
```
The following command deletes the domain example.com:
```
doctl compute domain delete example.com
```

How to Delete a Domain Using the DigitalOcean API

Create a personal access token and save it for use with the API.
Send a DELETE request to https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/domains/{domain_name}.

cURL

Using cURL:

curl -X DELETE \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN" \
  "https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/domains/example.com"

Go

Using Godo, the official DigitalOcean API client for Go:

import (
    "context"
    "os"

    "github.com/digitalocean/godo"
)

func main() {
    token := os.Getenv("DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN")

    client := godo.NewFromToken(token)
    ctx := context.TODO()

    _, err := client.Domains.Delete(ctx, "example.com")
}

Ruby

Using DropletKit, the official DigitalOcean API client for Ruby:

require 'droplet_kit'
token = ENV['DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN']
client = DropletKit::Client.new(access_token: token)

client.domains.delete(name: 'example.com')

Python

Using PyDo, the official DigitalOcean API client for Python:

import os
from pydo import Client

client = Client(token=os.environ.get("DIGITALOCEAN_TOKEN"))

delete_resp = client.domains.delete(domain_name="example.com")

Delete a Domain Using the Control Panel

To delete a domain, log in to the control panel and click Networking in the main menu to go to the Domains tab.

Open the More menu of the domain you want to delete, then click Delete. In the confirmation window, click Delete Domain to permanently delete the domain and its records from the account.