Social Connections not deleting on import with AUTH0_ALLOW_DELETE=true

[larsons-swt]

Checklist

• I have looked into the README and have not found a suitable solution or answer.
• I have looked into the documentation and have not found a suitable solution or answer.
• I have searched the issues and have not found a suitable solution or answer.
• I have upgraded to the latest version of this tool and the issue still persists.
• I have searched the Auth0 Community forums and have not found a suitable solution or answer.
• I agree to the terms within the Auth0 Code of Conduct.

Description

A source/export tenant with zero social connections present does not remove social connections that are present in downstream destination/import tenants.

This seems like either a bug with how the deploy tool handles an empty directory, or I'm not understanding how the AUTH0_ALLOW_DELETE functions.

Expectation

The expectation is that it would delete any social connection present in the stage/destination tenant.

Reproduction

1. In the dev/source tenant, delete all social connections, leaving none present.
2. Export the tenant config to code (using directory if that matters). This creates an empty 'connections' folder, which is expected.
3. Configure AUTH0_ALLOW_DELETE to true in the destination config.json file
4. Deploy an import action to the destination tenant
5. Any social connection present in that tenant remains and is not deleted.

Deploy CLI version

8.32.0

Node version

24.15.0

[harshithRai]

Hi @larsons-swt
Thank you for reporting this! I'll investigate this further and provide an update when I have something.

[harshithRai]

Hi @larsons-swt,

After some investigation, I was able to reproduce the issue. It seems to occur when:

1. Exporting using --format yaml (which produces a single tenant.yaml file)
2. Deploying by pointing --input_file to the folder rather than the tenant.yaml file directly

In this case, the directory context is picked up, which looks for a connections/ subdirectory. Since none exists in a yaml-format export, connections get treated as unmanaged and deletion is skipped entirely — even with AUTH0_ALLOW_DELETE=true.

Workaround for now: Point --input_file directly to the tenant.yaml file:

a0deploy deploy -c config.json --input_file path/to/export/tenant.yaml

Could you please confirm if this matches the setup? Specifically:

• What --format was used when exporting?
• What was passed to --input_file when deploying - the folder or the yaml file?

This will help narrow down the exact scenario and determine the best path forward.

Thanks!