“Fixing ‘Cannot Re-Use a Name That Is Still In Use’ Error in Terraform Helm Kubernetes Deployments”

Are you using Terraform to deploy Helm charts to your Kubernetes cluster, but running into an error that says “cannot re-use a name that is still in use”? Don’t worry, this is a common issue that can be easily resolved.

To start, you can use the basic Terraform provider for Helm with just two lines of code:

provider “helm” {
kubernetes {
config_path = “~/.kube/config”
}
}

However, if you encounter other errors while deploying an application, such as when trying to install the cluster autoscaler, you may get the “cannot re-use a name that is still in use” error when you try to re-run the deployment.

To fix this error, you’ll need to check if there are any secrets still present in the namespace you want to use. You can do this by running the following command:

kubectl -n kube-system get secrets | grep helm

If you find any secrets related to the application you’re trying to deploy, you can delete them using the kubectl delete secret command. For example, if you have a secret named sh.helm.release.v1.external-dns.v1 in the kube-system namespace, you can delete it using this command:

kubectl delete secret sh.helm.release.v1.external-dns.v1 -n kube-system

After deleting the secret, you should be able to re-run the Terraform deployment without encountering the “cannot re-use a name that is still in use” error.

In summary, the “cannot re-use a name that is still in use” error can be resolved by checking for any related secrets in the namespace and deleting them. With this simple fix, you can continue using Terraform to deploy Helm charts to your Kubernetes cluster without any issues.