Command to delete all pods in all kubernetes namespaces

Question

Upon looking at the docs, there is an API call to delete 'a' pod, but is there a way to kill all pods in all namespaces?

Answer 1

There is no command to do exactly what you asked.

Here are some close matches.

You can delete all the pods in a single namespace with this command:

kubectl delete --all pods --namespace=foo

You can also delete all deployments in namespace which will delete all pods attached with the deployments corresponding to the namespace

kubectl delete --all deployments --namespace=foo

You can delete all namespaces and every object in every namespace (but not un-namespaced objects, like nodes and some events) with this command:

kubectl delete --all namespaces

However, the latter command is probably not something you want to do, since it will delete things in the kube-system namespace, which will make your cluster not usable.

This command will delete all the namespaces except kube-system, which might be useful:

for each in $(kubectl get ns -o jsonpath="{.items[*].metadata.name}" | grep -v kube-system);
do
  kubectl delete ns $each
done