---
title: "Compact compacts the event history in the etcd key-value store. The key-value store should be periodically compacted or the event history will continue to grow indefinitely."
method: POST
path: "/v3/kv/compaction"
tags: ["KV"]
---

# Compact compacts the event history in the etcd key-value store. The key-value store should be periodically compacted or the event history will continue to grow indefinitely.

`POST /v3/kv/compaction`

## Request

- Base URL: `https://etcd.io` (the document declares no server; this is the origin it was published from)
- URL: `https://etcd.io/v3/kv/compaction`
- Auth: API key in header `Authorization`
- TypeScript: <https://skmtc.dev/etcd/apis/api-etcdserverpb-rpc-proto/docs/v3/kv/compaction/post.ts> (a function with typed inputs; its response is checked against the schema)

## Request body

- EtcdserverpbCompactionRequest: CompactionRequest compacts the key-value store up to a given revision. All superseded keys with a revision less than the compaction revision will be removed.
  - `physical` boolean: physical is set so the RPC will wait until the compaction is physically applied to the local database such that compacted entries are totally removed from the backend database.
  - `revision` string, int64: revision is the key-value store revision for the compaction operation.

## Response `200`

A successful response.

- EtcdserverpbCompactionResponse
  - `header` EtcdserverpbResponseHeader
    - `cluster_id` string, uint64: cluster_id is the ID of the cluster which sent the response.
    - `member_id` string, uint64: member_id is the ID of the member which sent the response.
    - `raft_term` string, uint64: raft_term is the raft term when the request was applied.
    - `revision` string, int64: revision is the key-value store revision when the request was applied. For watch progress responses, the header.revision indicates progress. All future events recieved in this stream are guaranteed to have a higher revision number than the header.revision number.

## Other responses

- `default`: An unexpected error response

---

[API](https://skmtc.dev/etcd/apis/api-etcdserverpb-rpc-proto.md) - [All operations](https://skmtc.dev/etcd/apis/api-etcdserverpb-rpc-proto/llms.txt) - [OpenAPI document](https://skmtc.dev/etcd/apis/api-etcdserverpb-rpc-proto/revisions/79259377f328?raw)