Magento 2 No Such Entity after deleting website

Today I had to rename a couple of websites / store views / stores in a multi-website configuration (a new Magento 2 build for a Magento 1 site). There were approximately 7 websites each with an individual store view.

Why?

The initial quest was to rename a couple of store views, so that they had very specific store view store_id (due to the nature of a legacy backend system and the constraints imposed).

Version: Magento 2.1.2 CE

Mage mode: Production

What happened after the shuffle & delete

Once I had finally renamed every Website / Store View & Store and deleted the websites not required (including stores/store views) – I thought it would be a good idea to recompile:

php bin/magento setup:di:compile

and static files:

php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

After this had completed I decided to click around the backend to check data – I went to Customers but noticed a very strange message:

No such entity

I looked around and found out this was a bug but it was fixed: https://github.com/magento/magento2/issues/2921.

This means the problem I was experiencing was not related to that bug (since it was fixed).

I’m still not sure why this error occurs since I yet to fully understand dependency injection in general but there was a solution.

The Fix

At my wits end without a good resource for an instant response (other than stack exchange or the Magento forum), I decided to obliterate the var/di & pub/static directory completely:

 rm -rf var/di && rm -rf pub/static 

Then recompile:

php bin/magento setup:di:compile && php bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy

and that did the trick. No more “No such entity.” problem.