How to prevent garbage collection for helm releases?

[ableuler]

Thanks for this awesome project that we've been adopting in my team over the past months!

However, now I'm running into a question which I don't find a solution for in the docs: Is it possible to prevent garbage collection for helm releases. Specifically, I want to be able to delete a helmRelease resource from the cluster without flux subsequently deleting the actual helm release.

If I interpret the documentation here correctly, the annotation kustomize.toolkit.fluxcd.io/prune: disabled on the helmRelease resource will prevent the helmRelease from being garbaged collected on deletion of a parent kustomization, which is useful but not what I am looking for here.

In the helmRelease API reference I don't see any field that would allow me to disable pruning. Am I missing something or is this not yet supported?

[stefanprodan]

Before deleting a HelmRelease you can suspend it with flux suspend hr <name> then flux delete hr <name>, and the actual Helm release will not be garbage collected. You can do the same in Git by setting the HelmRelease.spec.suspend to true, then reconcile, then delete it from Git.

[artem-nefedov]

Is there a way to do it without completely disabling reconcile loop for helm, similar to how Kustomization's prune: false does it?

E.g. I know ahead of time that I will need to keep resources after deleting HelmRelease, but I still want updates for it to work properly.

[ableuler]

Thanks for the quick response. I think being able to set this as a property of HelmRelease similar to the case of a Kustomization might be useful, but it's definitely good to know of this trick.

[qudongfang]

does this trick work on Kustomization too?

[matheuscscp]

Yes: https://github.com/fluxcd/kustomize-controller/blob/60b8f86f490b46110d95079a49544de5580807c5/internal/controller/kustomization_controller.go#L988-L991