Overview

Date: 2026-05-11

Time: 15:36

Overview

A standalone teardown script that destroys a Linode cloud instance by looking up its label from a local state file and issuing a DELETE against the Linode API. It cleans up the state file afterward. This is the counterpart to a provisioning script that creates instances and writes state.json.

Usage Patterns

# Destroy using default state.json in current directory
LINODE_TOKEN=xxx ./destroy_linode.py

# Destroy using a custom state file
LINODE_TOKEN=xxx ./destroy_linode.py my-server-state.json

Runs as a uv run script — uv resolves the httpx dependency automatically, no venv setup needed.

API and Configuration

| Input | Type | Description |

|-------|------|-------------|

| argv[1] | CLI arg (optional) | Path to state file. Defaults to state.json |

| LINODE_TOKEN | Env var (required) | Linode API personal access token |

State file format — expects JSON with a resources dict where each value has a "label" key:

{"resources": {"my_server": {"label": "my-linode-label"}}}

Key Behaviors

• Idempotent: If the state file doesn't exist, exits cleanly with no error. If the Linode is already deleted, cleans up the state file and exits normally.
• Label-based lookup: Finds the instance by matching the label against all instances returned by GET /linode/instances, not by stored instance ID. This means it scans the full instance list.
• First resource only: Uses next(iter(resources.values())) — only processes the first resource in the state file, ignoring any others.
• Hard failure on API errors: Calls raiseforstatus() on both the list and delete calls — any HTTP error (auth failure, rate limit, server error) raises an unhandled exception.
• State cleanup: Always deletes the state file after a successful destroy or when the instance is already gone.

Relationships

• Pairs with a provisioning script that creates Linode instances and writes the state file this script reads.
• Linode API v4: Uses httpx to call GET /linode/instances and DELETE /linode/instances/{id}.
• uv script runner: Declared as a PEP 723 inline script with httpx as its only dependency.