Managing Users

Stream Users require only an id to be created. Users can be created with role of user or admin. The role will be set to user if a value is not provided in the request. There are additional properties you can provide to further describe your users.

If you wish to have users join a chat before they have created an account, check out our Anonymous User support

Stream Chat exposes a connectUser method that automatically creates and updates the user. Please note that the connectUser call has some limitations:

For example, if you're looking to sync your user base, you'll want to use the upsertUsers function server-side and send users in bulk.

The upsertUsers method creates or updates users, and accepts batch of users in the form of an array of user objects. Any user present in the payload will have its data replaced with the new version. (see below for partial updates) You can send up to 100 users per API request in both upsertUsers and partialUpdateUser.

For example, a client authenticated as a user with permission to create new users or using serverside authentication can create or update a new user:

And for a batch of users, simply add additional entries (up to 100) into the array you pass to upsertUsers:

If you need to update a subset of properties for a user(s), you can use a partial update method. Both set and unset parameters can be provided to add, modify, or remove attributes to or from the target user(s). The set and unset parameters can be used separately or combined.

Please see below for an example:

Clients can set a username, by setting the name custom field. The field is optional and by default has no uniqueness constraints applied to it, however this is configurable by setting the enforce_unique_username to either app, team or no.

When checking for uniqueness, the name is normalized, by removing any white-space or other special characters, and finally transforming it to lowercase. So "John Doe" is considered a duplicate of "john doe", "john.doe", etc.

When this setting is set to app, attempts to create or update a user with an existing name in this app, will fail with duplicate username error.

When set to team, attempts to create or update a user with an existing name will fail only if the name already exists within a common team.

To deactivate a user, Stream Chat exposes a deactivateUser method. This method can only be called server-side due to security concerns, so please keep this in mind when attempting to make the call.

Deactivated users cannot:

• Connect to Stream Chat

• Send or receive messages

• (deactivated users can be reactivated, see below)

Below is an example of how to execute the call to deactivateUser:

The response will contain an object with the user ID that was deactivated. Further, the user will no longer be able to connect to Stream Chat as an error will be thrown.

To reinstate the user as active, use the reactivateUser method by passing the users ID as a parameter:

Many users (up to 100) can be deactivated and reactivated with only one call. The operation will be ran asynchronously, the response  contains a task_id which can be polled using the getTask endpoint to check the status of the operation.

While it is usually safer for data retention to deactivate a user, some use cases require completely deleting a user and their data. Regional or platform regulations such as the GDPR right to deletion or Apple App Store's data collection and storage guidelines are two examples of regulations that require this.

To delete user data, Stream Chat exposes a deleteUser method. Once a user has been hard deleted, it cannot be un-deleted and the user_id cannot be used again. This method can only be called server-side due to security concerns, so please keep this in mind when attempting to make the call.

Below is an example of how to execute the call to deleteUser:

To perform a "hard delete" on the user, you must set mark_messages_deleted to true and provide an additional parameter called hard_delete with the value set to true. This method will delete all messages, reactions, and any other associated data with the user. Another option is delete_conversation_channels, if set true the deleted user is removed from all one-to-one channels.

After deleting or hard deleting a user, the user will no longer be able to:

• Connect to Stream Chat

• Send or receive messages

• Be displayed when querying users

• Have messages stored in Stream Chat (depending on whether or not mark_messages_deleted is set to true or false)

These are the request parameters which determine what user data is deleted:

You can delete up to 100 users and optionally all of their channels and messages using this method. First the users are marked deleted synchronously so the user will not be directly visible in the API. Then the process deletes the user and related objects asynchronously by scheduling a task to be handles by the task worker.

This method can only be called server-side due to security concerns. This is supported on the following SDK versions (or higher):

• Javascript 4.3.0, Python 3.14.0, Ruby 2.12.0, PHP 2.6.0, Go 3.13.0, Java 1.4.0 and .NET 0.22.0

The deleteUsers response contain a task_id which can be polled using the getTask endpoint to check the status of the deletions.

These are the request parameters which determine what user data is deleted:

If users are soft (only) deleted they can be restored using server side client. However, only user's metadata is restored, membership, messages etc... can't be put back.

You can restore up to 100 users per call: