Namespace "stuck" as Terminating, How do I remove it?

Assuming you've already tried to force-delete resources like: Pods stuck at terminating status, and your at your wits' end trying to recover the namespace...

You can force-delete the namespace (perhaps leaving dangling resources):

(NAMESPACE=your-rogue-namespacekubectl proxy &kubectl get namespace $NAMESPACE -o json |jq '.spec = {"finalizers":[]}' >temp.jsoncurl -k -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X PUT --data-binary @temp.json 127.0.0.1:8001/api/v1/namespaces/$NAMESPACE/finalize)

• This is a refinement of the answer here, which is based on the comment here.

• I'm using the jq utility to programmatically delete elements in the finalizers section. You could do that manually instead.

• kubectl proxy creates the listener at 127.0.0.1:8001 by default. If you know the hostname/IP of your cluster master, you may be able to use that instead.

• The funny thing is that this approach seems to work even when using kubectl edit making the same change has no effect.

This is caused by resources still existing in the namespace that the namespace controller is unable to remove.

This command (with kubectl 1.11+) will show you what resources remain in the namespace:

kubectl api-resources --verbs=list --namespaced -o name \  | xargs -n 1 kubectl get --show-kind --ignore-not-found -n <namespace>

Once you find those and resolve and remove them, the namespace will be cleaned up

As mentioned before in this thread there is another way to terminate a namespace using API not exposed by kubectl by using a modern version of kubectl where kubectl replace --raw is available (not sure from which version). This way you will not have to spawn a kubectl proxy process and avoid dependency with curl (that in some environment like busybox is not available). In the hope that this will help someone else I left this here:

kubectl get namespace "stucked-namespace" -o json \  | tr -d "\n" | sed "s/\"finalizers\": \[[^]]\+\]/\"finalizers\": []/" \  | kubectl replace --raw /api/v1/namespaces/stucked-namespace/finalize -f -