Mongoose Soft Remove

Mongoose Soft Remove is a Mongoose plugin that transparently introduces soft deletion to mongoose. It does this by overriding built in model methods. Note that these changed do not break compatibility with the Mongoose API; all changes are a superset of existing functionality. Because of this you can simply drop in this plugin and have soft delete functionality without any code changes.

When you call the static or instance remove method on a model, instead of deleting the document, the document is marked as removed.

Contact.remove({ name: 'Robert Hurst' });
// or
Contact.findOne({ name: 'Robert Hurst' }, function(err, contact) {
  contact.remove();
});

If you wish to actually delete the document instead of soft deletion you may do so by setting softRemove to false in the options object for the remove instance method, or by setting $softRemove to false in the query object passed to the static remove method.

Contact.remove({ name: 'Robert Hurst', $softRemove: false });
// or
Contact.findOne({ name: 'Robert Hurst' }, function(err, contact) {
  contact.remove({ softRemove: false });
});

Once a document has been soft deleted it will not be found by count, update, find, findOne, findOneAndRemove, findOneAndUpdate, or findById unless explicitly requested by setting isRemoved to true in the query object.

Contact.findOne({ name: 'Robert Hurst' }, function(err, contact) {
  // contact is null
});
Contact.findOne({ name: 'Robert Hurst', isRemoved: true }, function(err, contact) {
  // contact is {
  //   _id      : 568da2931fd5055957c88f4b
  //   name     : 'Robert Hurst',
  //   isRemoved: true,
  //   removedAt: Mon Jan 04 2016 16:39:23 GMT-0800 (PST)
  // }
});

The library also provides a static and instance method for restoring documents.

Contact.restore({ name: 'Robert Hurst' });
// or
Contact.findOne({ name: 'Robert Hurst', isRemoved: true }, function(err, contact) {
  contact.restore();
});

Things to note

This plugin adds a removedAt and a virtual isRemoved property to each schema affected. removedAt is indexed. removedAt is only set on the document if the document is soft deleted.