Delete all Product Variations Using REST API

Recently I have found this question on the internet and since I was doing exactly the same when developing WooCommerce functionality for my crossposting plugin, I decided to create a small guide for you.

The long story short we will need two REST API requests here:

• To get all variations of a specific product,
• To delete all of them in a single batch request.

I think the most clear way here would be to create a function for that, let’s say for example rudr_delete_all_variations() or something.

Let’s do it:

function rudr_delete_all_variations( $product_id, $store ) {
	
	// first of all let's get variations of a product
	$response = wp_remote_get(
		add_query_arg(
			array(
				'per_page' => 50,
				'page' => 1,
				'status' => 'any', // publish or private
			),
			"{$store[ 'url' ]}/wp-json/wc/v3/products/{$product_id}/variations"
		),
		array(
			'headers' => array(
				'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode( "{$store[ 'login' ]}:{$store[ 'pwd' ]}" )
			)
		)
	);
	
	$variations = json_decode( wp_remote_retrieve_body( $response ), true );
	if( $variations ) {
		return false;
	}
	
	$variations_ids = wp_list_pluck( $variations, 'id' );
	
	// now remove the variations in a single batch
	wp_remote_post(
		"{$store[ 'url' ]}/wp-json/wc/v3/products/{$product_id}/variations/batch",
		array(
			'headers' => array(
				'Authorization' => 'Basic ' . base64_encode( "{$store[ 'login' ]}:{$store[ 'pwd' ]}" )
			),
			'body' => array( 'delete' => $variations_ids )
		)
	);
	
}

What we’re doing inside the function:

• $store is the array with store information, which contains URL, username of an administrator and an application password of the same user.
• I am using wp_remote_get() HTTP API function to send a GET request and wp_remote_post() to send a POST request, that should be clear I guess or of course in both cases I could use wp_remote_request().
• wp_list_pluck() by the way is an amazing function which allows us to convert an array of arrays with variation data like Array( 'id' => 1, 'date_created' => ... into just an array with variation IDs Array( 1, 5, 15 ....
• Is it possible to run this function for all the available variations across the store? I guess so, but I assume creating custom REST API route would be a better and more performant decision than creating an additional REST API request which returns all the products.

# WooCommerce, REST API, Variable Products

Misha Rudrastyh

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