Helm Release stuck in Uninstalling state

Question

I was trying to uninstall a helm release in my AKS cluster using helm uninstall RELEASE_NAME but seems like it failed. The failure happened because for some reason all of the nodes in my cluster went in a not ready state when I used helm uninstall.

Since then, I got all the nodes to get back up and running and the cluster is functioning as it should. Now, when I do try helm list, I don't get to see this release present anymore, but doing a helm list -a shows me that the state of the release is still in uninstalling state. I have tried quite a few things, but it has been stuck there now for the last 3-4 days.

A few things that I tried was to use helm uninstall RELEASE_NAME, helm delete --purge RELEASE_NAME but these commands throw an error because the release is already in uninstalling state. I tried modifying the helm secrets in the cluster for this specific release but that didn't help either. Helm3 is being used so it is not like I can restart the tiller pod to maybe stabilize this.

Does Helm3 use some kind of a finalizer mechanism which can be modified to rectify this or is there no alternate way in which I can perhaps try to delete this release? I want to use the same release name for the specific API in the future too.

Any help will be really appreciated.

Answer 1

Based on the discussion, the following steps resolve the issue.

helm hist releasename
helm rollback releasename versionnumber-with-status-deployed

if this did not help, then delete secret for each version

helm hist releasename
kubectl get secrets
k delete secrets sh.helm.release.v1.name.VERSION-N