How to delete a droplet after runnig my job

Posted August 28, 2020
DigitalOcean API and CLI (doctl)

Hi, I have to run jobs for several hours, but after finishing them I want to destroy the droplet where they were being run. I have tried to accomplish this using doctl and an access token. The problem is that when I try to authenticate inside the droplet, running: doctl auth init --access-token $DO_TOKEN, I get the following error: Error: mkdir /root/.config: permission denied.

Any idea how to solve that? Or another way to destroy a droplet?

If it helps, I created the droplet using: doctl compute droplet create test --image ubuntu-20-04-x64 --size s-1vcpu-1gb --region nyc1 --ssh-keys $(key_md5)

antoniogamiz10

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Bobby Iliev • August 28, 2020

Hi there @antoniogamiz10,

I recently wrote an answer to a similar question on how to delete a Droplet after running a specific task:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/create-droplet-to-run-single-task-then-destroy

It includes a short script as well.

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby

baraboom • August 28, 2020

I’m actually not that familiar with doctl but I was able to find this open bug:

https://github.com/digitalocean/doctl/issues/591

tl;dr: Try creating the ~/.config directory before running doctl for the first time, like this:

mkdir -p ~/.config

The -p flag is handy for scripting as it will not error out if the directory already exists.