---
title: "Decommission a node"
description: "Manually decommission a node in a self-managed Calico Open Source cluster with calicoctl, releasing IP allocations and BGP peers from the datastore cleanly."
product: "Calico Open Source"
version: "3.32 (latest)"
section: "Operations"
canonical_url: "https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/operations/decommissioning-a-node"
---

# Decommission a node

## About decommissioning nodes

If you are running the [node controller](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/reference/kube-controllers/configuration.md) or using the Kubernetes API datastore in policy-only mode, you do not need to manually decommission nodes.

In other configurations, you may need to manually decommission a node for one of the following reasons.

- You are decommissioning a host running `calico/node` or removing it from your cluster.
- You are renaming a node.
- You are receiving an error about an IP address already in use.
- Readiness checks are failing due to unreachable peers that are no longer in the cluster.
- Hosts are regularly added and removed from your cluster.

## Purpose of this page

Provide guidance on how to remove a host that is part of a Calico cluster and clean up the associated [node resource reference](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/reference/resources/node.md) information.

## Prerequisites

- Prior to removing any Node resource from the datastore the `calico/node` container should be stopped on the corresponding host and it should be ensured that it will not be restarted.
- You must have [calicoctl configured](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/operations/calicoctl/install.md) and operational to run the commands listed here.

## Removing a node resource

Removing a Node resource will also remove the Workload Endpoint, Host Endpoint, and IP Address resources and any other sub configuration items associated with that Node.

> **SECONDARY:**
>
> - Deleting a Node resource may be service impacting if the host is still in service. Ensure that the host is no longer in service before deleting the Node resource.
> - Any configuration specific to the node will be removed. This would be configuration like node BGP peerings or custom Felix configs.

## Removing a single node resource

See the example below for how to remove a node with the calicoctl command.

See [Removing a Node resource](#removing-a-node-resource) above.

```bash
calicoctl delete node <nodeName>
```

## Removing multiple node resources

To remove several Nodes, a file can be created with several Node resources and then be passed to the `calicoctl delete` command with the `-f` flag. Below is an example of how to create a file of Nodes and delete them.

1. Create a file with the [Node resources](https://docs.tigera.io/calico/latest/reference/resources/node.md) that need to be removed. For example:

   ```yaml
   - apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
     kind: Node
     metadata:
       name: node-02
   - apiVersion: projectcalico.org/v3
     kind: Node
     metadata:
       name: node-03
   ```

2. To delete the nodes listed in the file pass it like below.

   > **WARNING:** See [Removing a Node resource](#removing-a-node-resource) above.

   ```bash
   calicoctl delete -f nodes_to_delete.yaml
   ```