topic Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users in ArcGIS Enterprise Portal Questions

Cannot Delete Portal Users

BobbiLay — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 18:45:56 GMT

I keep getting the same error (when I'm logged in as admin): Cannot delete user *%$*(*^ Member must not own items or groups.... I could understand if this person did own ANYTHING but the person has never even logged in. We have hardly used Portal and I recently upgraded to 10.3. I'd be perfectly happy to just start from scratch but I'm not sure what I would change to get a clean slate. I feel like a full uninstall may not even do it. If I don't find a way to get rid of users I may end up doing that. Command line deleteusers is no help either.

boo

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

JayantaPoddar — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 11:04:25 GMT

The user might not have logged into Portal, but published services through ArcCatalog. If you are logged in as an administrator, you could check the item info of the user (that you want to delete). Any linked data/services? If found, you could move the data to a folder of different user or change the owner.

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

AndrewAidt2 — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:35:36 GMT

I have an admin user in portal 10.5 that I cannot delete. They do not own any items or groups.

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

AndrewAidt2 — Thu, 26 Oct 2017 19:37:22 GMT

I found that the member I was attempting to delete was a MEMBER of one group (NOT OWNER!). Once I removed them from that group, I could delete that member! VERY FRUSTRATING!

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

swoiak — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 14:30:58 GMT

I am having the same issue. I used an account to transfer content from our AGOL organization to our Portal, after which I moved the content to another Portal account. The account now has no content, owns no groups, is a member of no groups, and yet I am unable to delete it. I am also unable to access it - tried to reset the password but no email to reset the password was ever sent, so now I am unable to log into the account. Any ideas?

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

EricPeña — Fri, 19 Jan 2018 22:27:45 GMT

A complete reboot of my Portal server (not restart of the service) fixed this. Once I rebooted I was able to delete the users that seem to have been locked.

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

FabianMeyer1 — Thu, 19 Apr 2018 12:09:21 GMT

Hi. Did you find a solution for this problem? I am having exactly the same issue and restarting services has no effect.

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

AxinGlobal — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 02:57:50 GMT

Hi,

I also have this issue currently with 2 users in a 10.6 ArcGIS Enterprise implementation. Both users have no owned groups or items (as well as not being a member of any groups).

I am unable to do any of the following; delete, log in to, reset password, change user level to level 1, update profile details.

What I can do with these users; add remove from groups, disable then re-enable (note disabling does not free up their named user license).

I have noted that in the https://portal.domain.com/arcgis/portaladmin/system/indexer/status it shows that our users index is way out at the moment. Running a reindex did not fix this index issue though. Somehow these users have become stuck in limbo, i.e. they exist in some tables/locations but not in others, or are incomplete/broken in some other way. See index image here:

Have tried the following to resolve without success: both a reboot of all enterprise services (portal/server etc) and have also tried restarting actual machines, obviously deleting users manually through normal organisation gui, have tried reindex as mentioned above, have also tried using command line utility within portal install.

Any ideas anyone has on how to hard reset these users without having to dumb the entire content directory would be most appreciated.

Thanks Hamish

portal admin‌ portal‌ portal 10.6‌ portal account‌ esri portal‌ arcgisportal‌ portal_for_arcgis‌ arcgis_portal‌ portal for arcgis adminstration‌ enterprise user‌ arcgis enterprise 10.6‌ arcgis administration‌ arcgis enterprise portal‌ enterprise locks‌ enterprise‌

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

FabianMeyer1 — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 05:52:54 GMT

Hi,

ESRI Support Team told me to delete the users manually in the database this way:

1. Open Win-Cmd as Admin and navigate to C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\Portal\framework\runtime\pgsql\bin
2. Run command: psql -h localhost -p 7654 -U portaladmin -d gwdb -c "SELECT username FROM gw_users WHERE username = 'piersp2@SIGI'"
3. If the previous command is successful than run: psql -h localhost -p 7654 -U portaladmin -d gwdb -c "DELETE FROM gw_users WHERE username = 'piersp2@SIG'
4. Reindex

Regards,

Fabian

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

AxinGlobal — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 01:19:40 GMT

Fantastic, thanks for posting this Fabian. I'm going to try it asap. This obviously worked for you?

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

FabianMeyer1 — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 04:56:06 GMT

Yes, it did.

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

AnibalMmartinez — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 15:03:08 GMT

Gracias, tenemos el mismo problema en nuestra empresa con 10.5.0, y esto ocurrió con el agregado del primer usuario. ¿Si lo solucionamos, hay garantía de que no vuelva a pasar?, ¿se sabe porque ocurre el issue?. Gracias Anibal

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

TroyBum72 — Thu, 07 Oct 2021 17:53:20 GMT

This worked PERFECT for me too. Thanks! It is nice when the forums have good useful information, and people report back successes. NOTE: The pgsql tools all say "initial admin account and pw" and it means it, not sure how/if you can change the password but we do have a rigorous PW management/recycle/complexity standard and it took a bit to come up with the "original" password in order to run the pgsql tools. 🙂

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

MarkWestergaard — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 13:58:49 GMT

I realize this thread is a bit old, but I ran into this issue on my new 11.1 installation (Linux) after enabling SSO with Azure Active Directory. Prior to AAD, I gave myself a regular "built-in" account for initial testing. After enabling SSO, I transferred all of the content from that account to my new AAD account. I verified the test account had no items and no group memberships. When I tried to delete the test account, it claimed there were items or groups. If I tried to display either, it claimed there were none.

I used the psql command described above but the account persisted in the portal interface and I could see the index status was incorrect, also described above. The reindex step ultimately cleared it.

Re: Cannot Delete Portal Users

LennardLux — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 15:42:29 GMT

Hi Mark, now this thread is even older, but i experienced the same issue. 🙂the commands and reindexing worked as well. do you know what the cause of this problem is? I created and deleted the user using the python api using the commands below. manually deleting the user in the portal did not cause the same issue.🤔

UserMgr = UserManager(gis) UserMgr.create(...) UserMgr.delete_users(...)