What is the most efficient way to delete/expire all messages in a Apache Pulsar topic?

Question

I'm trying to figure out what would be the best way to remove all the messages from a Pulsar topic (either logically or physically), so that they are no longer consumable by subscriptions?

I know we can simply do $ pulsar-admin persistent delete persistent://tenant/namespace/topic.

But, this solution has some drawbacks: it removes the topic completely (so we have to recreate it later) then there should be no active client connected to it (i.e: subscriptions or producers).

Alternatively is there a way to programmatically make all messages between two MessageId unavailable to the subscriptions ?

Thanks

Answer 1

There are a couple of options you can choose from.

• You can use topics skip to skip N messages for a specific subscription of a given topic. https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/en/admin-api-persistent-topics/#skip-messages

• You can use topics skip-all to skip all the old messages for a specific subscription for a given topic. https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/en/admin-api-persistent-topics/#skip-all-messages

• You can use topics clear-backlog to clear the backlog of a specific subscription. It is same as topics skip-all.

• You can also use topics reset-cursor to move the subscription cursor to a specific message id or a timestamp back.

Answer 2

From Sijie Guo's answer, I tried skip-all, but got:

Expected a command, got skip-all Invalid command, please use pulsar-admin --help to check out how to use

I retried with clear-backlog with success.

https://github.com/apache/pulsar/issues/5685#issuecomment-664751216
The doc is updated here: https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/pulsar-admin/#list-5
but not here: https://pulsar.apache.org/docs/admin-api-topics#skip-all-messages
So it's confusing