Helm in Practice

Uninstalling a Release

The general syntax to remove a release is:

helm uninstall [RELEASE_NAME] [flags]

When a release is uninstalled, the Kubernetes resources associated with the release are deleted from the cluster.

For example, to uninstall the my-wordpress release, run the following command:

helm uninstall my-wordpress

# or to avoid errors if the release does not exist
helm uninstall my-wordpress --ignore-not-found

This command will delete all the Kubernetes resources created by the my-wordpress release, except immutable resources like volumes (e.g., PersistentVolumeClaims).

# Check PVCs
kubectl get pvc -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=my-wordpress

# You need to delete them manually if you want to remove them as well
kubectl delete pvc -l app.kubernetes.io/instance=my-wordpress

Also, the release history is deleted by default:

helm history my-wordpress

You should see an error similar to this: Error: release: not found. If you want to keep the release history when uninstalling a release, use the --keep-history flag: