CODEWITHSUNDEEP
kuberneteskubernetes-helmkubectl
lior.i
lior.i

Reputation: 747

What's the difference between helm uninstall, helm delete and kubectl delete

I want to remove pod that I deployed to my cluster with helm install.

I used 3 ways to do so:

  1. helm uninstall <release name> -> remove the pod from the cluster and from the helm list
  2. helm delete <release name> -> remove the pod from the cluster and from the helm list
  3. kubectl delete -n <namespace> deploy <deployment name> -> remove the pod from the cluster but not from the helm list

What's the difference between them? Is one better practice then the other?

Upvotes: 15

Views: 48335

Answers (4)

Shrikrishna C
Shrikrishna C

Reputation: 1

helm delete is older command which is now replaced by helm uninstall. This command basically uninstall all the resources in helm chart, which was previously deployed using helm install/upgrade.

kubectl delete will delete just resource which will get redeployed again if it was deployed by helm chart. So these command is useful if you want to redeploy pod or to delete resource if it was not deployed using helm chart approach.

Upvotes: 0

Blender Fox
Blender Fox

Reputation: 5635

helm delete is an alias for helm uninstall and you can see this when you check the --help syntax:

$ helm delete --help
...
Usage:
  helm uninstall RELEASE_NAME [...] [flags]

kubectl delete ... just removes the resource in the cluster.

Doing helm uninstall ... won't just remove the pod, but it will remove all the resources created by helm when it installed the chart. For a single pod, this might not be any different to using kubectl delete... but when you have tens or hundreds of different resources and dependent charts, doing all this manually by doing kubectl delete... becomes cumbersome, time-consuming and error-prone.

Generally, if you're deleting something off of the cluster, use the same method you used to install it in the first place. Namely, if you used helm install or helm upgrade --install to install it into the cluster, use helm uninstall to remove it (or helm delete --purge if you're still running Helm v2); and if you used kubectl create or kubectl apply, use kubectl delete to remove it.

Upvotes: 31

Bruno Penha
Bruno Penha

Reputation: 77

For me it is the same thing: uninstall, del, delete, and un for the helm (check Aliases):

$ helm del --help

This command takes a release name and uninstalls the release.

It removes all of the resources associated with the last release of the chart
as well as the release history, freeing it up for future use.

Use the '--dry-run' flag to see which releases will be uninstalled without actually
uninstalling them.

Usage:
  helm uninstall RELEASE_NAME [...] [flags]

Aliases:
  uninstall, del, delete, un

Upvotes: 2

Eugene
Eugene

Reputation: 120978

I will add a point that we use, quite a lot. helm uninstall/install/upgrade has hooks attached to its lifecycle. This matters a lot, here is a small example.

We have database scripts that are run as part of a job. Say you prepare a release with version 1.2.3 and as part of that release you add a column in a table - you have a script for that (liquibase/flyway whatever) that will run automatically when the chart is installed. In plain english helm install allows you to say in this case : "before installing the code, upgrade the DB schema". This is awesome and allows you to tie the lifecycle of such scripts, to the lifecycle of the chart.

The same works for downgrade, you could say that when you downgrade, revert the schema, or take any needed action. kubectl delete simply does not have such functionality.

Upvotes: 8

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