Using PowerShell to Delete a Site with Subsites in SharePoint Server 2010

When using the "DR.DADA" approach to SharePoint development, I often find myself deleting sites (in DEV and TEST environments) and subsequently re-activating features or running some migration utility to recreate the site hierarchy.

In fact, a few years ago this became such a common task on the Agilent Technologies project that I wrote a simple "DeleteWeb" program to overcome the fact that stsadm.exe -o deleteweb doesn't work on sites that have subsites.

Note that there really wasn't much to the DeleteWeb program. Almost all of the work was performed by the DeleteHelper class:

 using System;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Globalization;

using Microsoft.SharePoint;

namespace DeleteWeb
{
    public sealed class DeleteHelper
    {
        private DeleteHelper() { } // all members are static

        public static void DeleteWeb(
            string siteUrl)
        {
            using (SPSite site = new SPSite(siteUrl))
            {
                using (SPWeb web = site.OpenWeb())
                {
                    if (string.Compare(web.Url, siteUrl, true,
                        CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) != 0)
                    {
                        throw new InvalidOperationException(
                            "Invalid Web URL. Verify the URL and try again.");
                    }

                    DeleteWeb(web);
                }
            }
        }

        public static void DeleteWeb(
            SPWeb web)
        {
            SPWebCollection subwebs = web.GetSubwebsForCurrentUser();

            if (subwebs.Count > 0)
            {
                foreach (SPWeb subweb in subwebs)
                {
                    DeleteWeb(subweb);
                    subweb.Dispose();
                }
            }

            Debug.WriteLine("Deleting web: " + web.ServerRelativeUrl);
            web.Delete();
            return;
        }
    }
}

I was hoping that SharePoint Server 2010 would address this scenario out-of-the-box, but that doesn't appear to be the case.

Suppose that you have a site (e.g. https://foobar/Test) that has subsites (e.g. https://foobar/Test/foo and https://foobar/Test/bar). If you attempt to use the Remove-SPWeb cmdlet in SharePoint Server 2010 to delete the site...

Remove-SPWeb "https://foobar/Test" -Confirm:$false

...then you will encounter an error similar to the following:

Remove-SPWeb : Error deleting Web site "/Test". You can't delete a site that has subsites.
At line:1 char:13
+ Remove-SPWeb <<<< "https://foobar/Test" -Confirm:$false
+ CategoryInfo : InvalidData: (Microsoft.Share...CmdletRemoveWeb:SPCmdletRemoveWeb) [Remove-SPWeb], SPException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell.SPCmdletRemoveWeb

In order to delete a site that has subsites using PowerShell, we simply need to convert the C# code shown above into a corresponding PowerShell function, as shown below:

 # Completely deletes the specified Web (including all subsites)

function RemoveSPWebRecursively(
    [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb] $web)
{
    Write-Debug "Removing site ($($web.Url))..."
    
    $subwebs = $web.GetSubwebsForCurrentUser()
    
    foreach($subweb in $subwebs)
    {
        RemoveSPWebRecursively($subweb)
        $subweb.Dispose()
    }
    
    $DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
    Remove-SPWeb $web -Confirm:$false
    $DebugPreference = "Continue"
}

$DebugPreference = "SilentlyContinue"
$web = Get-SPWeb "https://foobar/Test"
$DebugPreference = "Continue"

If ($web -ne $null)
{
    RemoveSPWebRecursively $web
    $web.Dispose()
}

Note that the script handles the case where $web is null -- in other words, when the specified Web doesn't exist (for example, when running the script a second time).