How to delete your Microcks account

About deleting your Microcks account

Microcks is a robust open-source platform designed for API mocking and contract testing. It serves developers by allowing them to create mock services from OpenAPI, AsyncAPI, or Postman collections, providing a playground for testing service interaction without needing backend dependencies. Because it is often deployed in development environments to handle sensitive contract definitions and internal API schemas, securing your deployment is critical.

Users may seek to delete their Microcks presence for several reasons, including the transition to new service virtualization tools, a need to sanitize testing environments before a project concludes, or to remove potentially sensitive API structures that could expose internal service architecture. Since Microcks can be self-hosted, "deleting" an account often involves more than just a settings menu; it requires a systematic teardown of your infrastructure.

Reasons to delete your Microcks data include:

• Sanitizing development environments to remove outdated API contracts.
• Preventing unauthorized access to internal testing endpoints and mock data.
• Minimizing the attack surface by decommissioning unused containerized instances.
• Compliance with internal data hygiene policies regarding API documentation.

What happens to your data

When you delete your Microcks instance, the behavior depends on where the data is stored. Microcks typically relies on a backend database like MongoDB to store API mock definitions, test results, and service metadata. Deleting your account or instance triggers the removal of these specific items:

• API Mock Definitions: The structured files defining your services.
• Test Suites and Results: Execution history and validation reports.
• Import Jobs: Configuration settings for automated API discovery.
• User Identity Records: If using the managed or enterprise-integrated version, your authentication metadata.

Note that logs created during the testing process may persist in your infrastructure’s centralized logging stack (such as ELK or Splunk) even after the Microcks container is destroyed. You must manually purge these logs to ensure complete data removal.

Privacy considerations

Using Microcks involves managing service definitions that often describe internal network topology. If these definitions leak, they provide a roadmap for attackers to understand your service dependencies and internal API contracts. To maintain privacy, ensure that your instances are not exposed to the public internet and that you use proper OAuth2/OIDC integration for access control.

Privacy tips for Microcks users:

• Always deploy Microcks within a private VPC or behind a secure VPN.
• Sanitize mock data to ensure no real production customer data is inadvertently used as a template.
• Regularly rotate the secrets used for your Microcks database connections.
• Audit your configuration files to ensure sensitive API keys are not hardcoded into the mock definitions.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I remove a local Microcks instance?

To remove a local instance, use your container orchestration tool. If using Docker, run docker-compose down -v to stop the service and remove the associated volumes containing your data.

Does Microcks store production data?

Microcks is designed to store API mock definitions. However, if you or your team use real production payloads to populate your mocks, that data is stored in the Microcks backend database.

Can I recover my API definitions after deletion?

Once the underlying database volume is deleted or purged, Microcks data cannot be recovered. Ensure you have exported your collections as JSON or YAML files if you need them later.

Is my data shared with third parties?

Since Microcks is an open-source project, your data is stored wherever you choose to host it. The core software does not collect or transmit your API data to external servers.

What if I am using a SaaS version of Microcks?

If you are using a managed service provider offering Microcks, you must submit a formal request to their support department to purge your tenant data from their multi-tenant database systems.

Does deleting my account remove my test history?

Yes, deleting your account or instance terminates the associated database collections, which includes the entire history of contract test results and execution logs.