#13279·Helm

Helm uninstall --cascade orphan command deletes existing K8s resources

Author: afalhambra-hivemqCreated Aug 27, 2024Updated Sep 17, 2026
Labelsquestion/support

We have a use case where we have an existing Helm chart already released. We want to uninstall the existing Helm release but without removing any of the resources already created by the same. So we run the following Helm command:

helm uninstall my-release --cascade orphan -n my-namespace

This works fine for the resources containing an ownerReference field to a CustomResource. However, there are others such as ConfigMaps and ServiceAccounts which don't have such ownerReference and these ones are wiped out with the above command.

We would expect the command to not delete any of the existing resource already existing. As a workaround, we need to execute the following kubectl command:

bash
kubectl delete secret -l owner=helm,name=my-release -n my-namespace

Output of helm version:

version.BuildInfo{Version:"v3.14.0", GitCommit:"3fc9f4b2638e76f26739cd77c7017139be81d0ea", GitTreeState:"clean", GoVersion:"go1.21.6"}

Output of kubectl version:

Client Version: v1.30.0
Kustomize Version: v5.0.4-0.20230601165947-6ce0bf390ce3
Server Version: v1.30.0

Cloud Provider/Platform (AKS, GKE, Minikube etc.): Minikube