Delete Hue Users

Hue does not ship with a built-in option to delete user accounts from the web UI. If you need to remove stale or orphaned accounts, the only practical path is to drop into the Hue Django shell and call the ORM delete method directly. The steps below show both a single-user delete and a batch delete.

Prerequisites

• You have root or sudo access to the Hue server node.
• You know the Hue database password (the value of HUE_DATABASE_PASSWORD).
• The Hue server role is running (the process directory must exist).

Single-User Delete

The following command locates the active Hue server process directory, opens the Django shell, and deletes one user by username:

export HUE_CONF_DIR="/var/run/cloudera-scm-agent/process/$(ls -1 /var/run/cloudera-scm-agent/process | grep HUE_SERVER | sort -n | tail -1)"
HUE_IGNORE_PASSWORD_SCRIPT_ERRORS=1
HUE_DATABASE_PASSWORD="<huedbpass>"
/opt/cloudera/parcels/CDH/lib/hue/build/env/bin/hue shell << EOF
from django.contrib.auth.models import User
user = User.objects.get(username="tuser1")
user.delete()

EOF

Batch Delete

If you need to remove several users at once, use a list and the filter().delete() pattern:

export HUE_CONF_DIR="/var/run/cloudera-scm-agent/process/$(ls -1 /var/run/cloudera-scm-agent/process | grep HUE_SERVER | sort -n | tail -1)"
HUE_IGNORE_PASSWORD_SCRIPT_ERRORS=1
HUE_DATABASE_PASSWORD="<huedbpass>"
/opt/cloudera/parcels/CDH/lib/hue/build/env/bin/hue shell

Once the interactive Python prompt appears, run:

from django.contrib.auth.models import User
usernames = ['userabc', 'userdef']
User.objects.filter(username__in=usernames).delete()

This returns a tuple showing how many objects were deleted and a mapping of model names to counts, for example (2, {'auth.User': 2}).

Verifying the Deletion

After running either command, log in to the Hue web UI and confirm the user no longer appears in the user list. You can also re-run the shell and query:

User.objects.filter(username="tuser1").count()

A return value of 0 confirms the account is gone.

Things to Keep in Mind

• Hue stores its user data in its own database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite depending on your deployment). Deleting a user here does not remove the corresponding LDAP or Active Directory account.
• If the user had saved queries, notebooks, or dashboard items, those rows may remain in the database as orphans. A DBA can clean them up separately if needed.
• Because this is an unsupported path, Cloudera support may not be able to assist if the database ends up in an unexpected state. Always snapshot the database first.

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