Why helm upgrade --install failed when previous install is failure?

Question

This is the helm and tiller version:

> helm version --tiller-namespace data-devops
Client: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.9.1", GitCommit:"20adb27c7c5868466912eebdf6664e7390ebe710", GitTreeState:"clean"}
Server: &version.Version{SemVer:"v2.9.1", GitCommit:"20adb27c7c5868466912eebdf6664e7390ebe710", GitTreeState:"clean"}

The previous helm installation failed:

helm ls --tiller-namespace data-devops
NAME            REVISION        UPDATED                         STATUS  CHART                   NAMESPACE
java-maven-app  1               Thu Aug  9 13:51:44 2018        FAILED  java-maven-app-1.0.0    data-devops

When I tried to install it again using this command, it failed:

helm --tiller-namespace data-devops upgrade java-maven-app helm-chart --install \
        --namespace data-devops \
        --values helm-chart/values/stg-stable.yaml
Error: UPGRADE FAILED: "java-maven-app" has no deployed releases

Is the helm upgrade --install command going to fail, if the previous installation failed? I am expecting it to force install. Any idea?

Answer 1

This is or has been a helm issue for a while. It only affects the situation where the first install of a chart fails and has up to helm 2.7 required a manual delete of the failed release before correcting the issue and installing again. However there is now a --force flag available to address this case - https://github.com/helm/helm/issues/4004

Answer 2

Try:

helm delete --purge <deployment> 

This will do the trick

and for helm3 onwards you need to uninstall eg.

helm uninstall <deployment>  -n <namespace>