How to delete or uninstall specific helm chart resource ?

This tutorial guides you on how to delete or uninstall specific helm chart resource. To demonstrate this let’s first install a sample helm chart resource and later delete it.

Create/ Install a Helm Chart resource

Let’s use the GitHub sample Hello Helm for our exercise.

First, download the git hub code in your local directory or on your machine as shown below.

$ git clone https://github.com/cloudnativedevops/demo.git

Cloning into 'demo'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 885, done.
remote: Total 885 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 885
Receiving objects: 100% (885/885), 330.78 KiB | 13.78 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (363/363), done.

Verify, whether the Helm Chart deployment YAML files are there of the demo application in the following path /demo/hello-helm/k8s/demo as shown below.

~/demo/hello-helm/k8s/demo (sneppets)$ ls

Chart.yaml  production-values.yaml  staging-values.yaml  templates  values.yaml

The subdirectory /k8s/demo contains the Kubernetes manifest files to deploy the demo application. Let’s deploy by running the following command.

$ helm install demo /home/sneppets/demo/hello-helm/k8s/demo/

NAME: demo
LAST DEPLOYED: Mon Apr  5 11:11:56 2021
NAMESPACE: default
STATUS: deployed
REVISION: 1
TEST SUITE: None

Verify the resources after deployment is successful.

$ helm ls

NAME    NAMESPACE       REVISION        UPDATED                                 STATUS          CHART           APP VERSION
demo    default         1               2021-04-05 11:11:56.345206926 +0000 UTC deployed        demo-1.0.1

Now, let’s see how to delete specific helm chart resource in the next section.

Delete or uninstall specific helm chart resource

To delete or uninstall specific helm chart resource you need to run the following command.

$ helm delete demo

release "demo" uninstalled

Verify whether the resources are deleted.

$ helm ls

NAME    NAMESPACE       REVISION        UPDATED STATUS  CHART   APP VERSION

Note, if you wanted to keep the record/track of the releases even after uninstallation, you need to use the flag –keep-history as shown below. Don’t forget to check the status “uninstalled“.

$ helm delete demo --keep-history

release "demo" uninstalled

$ helm ls -a

NAME    NAMESPACE       REVISION        UPDATED                                 STATUS          CHART           APP VERSION
demo    default         1               2021-04-05 11:19:59.395317133 +0000 UTC uninstalled     demo-1.0.1

Note, if you try to install with the same name then you will get the following error. This is because of –keep-history flag used when the resource was deleted.

$ helm install demo /home/nithip/demo/hello-helm/k8s/demo/

Error: cannot re-use a name that is still in use

Alternatively you can use “uninstall” instead of “delete” because the command helm delete has been renamed to helm uninstall.

$ helm uninstall demo

release "demo" uninstalled

$ helm ls

NAME    NAMESPACE       REVISION        UPDATED STATUS  CHART   APP VERSION

That’s it you had learnt how to create a Helm Chart resource and also tried deleting specific helm chart resource using delete and uninstall commands.

Hope it helped 🙂

How to delete or uninstall specific helm chart resource ?

Create/ Install a Helm Chart resource

Delete or uninstall specific helm chart resource

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References