Lifecycle & Config

Destroying Actors

Actors can be permanently destroyed. Common use cases include:

User account deletion
Ending a user session
Closing a room or game
Cleaning up temporary resources
GDPR/compliance data removal

Actors sleep when idle, so destruction is only needed to permanently remove data — not to save compute.

Destroying An Actor

Destroy via Action

To destroy an actor, use c.destroy() like this:

import { actor } from "rivetkit";

interface UserInput {
  email: string;
  name: string;
}

const userActor = actor({
  createState: (c, input: UserInput) => ({
    email: input.email,
    name: input.name,
  }),
  actions: {
    deleteAccount: (c) => {
      c.destroy();
    },
  },
});

TypeScript

Destroy via HTTP

Send a DELETE request to destroy an actor. This requires an admin token for authentication.

await fetch(`https://api.rivet.dev/actors/${actorId}?namespace=${namespace}`, {
  method: "DELETE",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${token}`,
  },
});

Creating admin tokens is currently not supported on Rivet Cloud. See the tracking issue.

Destroy via Dashboard

To destroy an actor via the dashboard, navigate to the actor and press the red "X" in the top right.

Lifecycle Hook

Once destroyed, the onDestroy hook will be called. This can be used to clean up resources related to the actor. For example:

import { actor } from "rivetkit";
import { Resend } from "resend";

const resend = new Resend(process.env.RESEND_API_KEY);

interface UserInput {
  email: string;
  name: string;
}

const userActor = actor({
  createState: (c, input: UserInput) => ({
    email: input.email,
    name: input.name,
  }),
  onDestroy: async (c) => {
    await resend.emails.send({
      from: "noreply@example.com",
      to: c.state.email,
      subject: "Account Deleted",
      text: `Goodbye ${c.state.name}, your account has been deleted.`,
    });
  },
  actions: {
    deleteAccount: (c) => {
      c.destroy();
    },
  },
});

TypeScript

Accessing Actor After Destroy

Once an actor is destroyed, any subsequent requests to it will return an actor_not_found error. The actor's state is permanently deleted.

API Reference

ActorHandle - Has destroy methods
ActorContext - Context during destruction