---
title: "Deleting holders — Permissions for Laravel | Roundly"
description: "Stop a new record from inheriting a deleted holder’s grants — detach on delete, or prune orphaned pivot rows."
url: https://roundly-consulting.com/open-source/docs/permissions-for-laravel/deleting-holders
language: en
---

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[Permissions for Laravel](https://roundly-consulting.com/open-source/docs/permissions-for-laravel.md)

# Deleting holders

model\_roles and model\_permissions are polymorphic pivots, so they cannot foreign-key the holder table — deleting a user leaves its grant rows behind. If your app ever reuses primary keys (truncate and reseed, imports, non-autoincrement strategies), a new record that inherits an old id would silently inherit the deleted holder’s roles and permissions. Prevent that in one of two ways.

## Detach on delete

Call forgetAllAuthorization() from the model’s deleting (or deleted) hook — the trait shorthand for Permissions::for($model)->forgetAllAuthorization(). It detaches every role and direct permission in one transaction and flushes the cache once the write commits:

```php
use Illuminate\Foundation\Auth\User as Authenticatable;
use RoundlyConsulting\Permissions\Concerns\HasRoles;

class User extends Authenticatable
{
    use HasRoles;

    protected static function booted(): void
    {
        static::deleting(fn (self $model) => $model->forgetAllAuthorization());
    }
}
```

## Prune orphans

Or sweep periodically. Permissions::pruneOrphans() deletes pivot rows whose model\_type + model\_id no longer resolve to a model — including rows whose morph type no longer maps to any class — and returns how many rows it removed:

```php
use RoundlyConsulting\Permissions\Facades\Permissions;

Permissions::pruneOrphans(); // int — rows deleted
```

The prune command runs the same thing and reports the count:

```bash
php artisan permissions:prune-orphans
```

Schedule it to run on its own:

```php
// routes/console.php
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schedule;

Schedule::command('permissions:prune-orphans')->daily();
```

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