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How to Restart All Pods in a Kubernetes Namespace

By Lane Wagner on Oct 26, 2020

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Where I work, we use a repo-per-namespace setup and so it often happens that I want to restart all pods and deployments in a single Kubernetes namespace.

Maybe I want to see the startup logs, or maybe I want to shut down production for a few seconds. Don’t question my motives.

Anyway, what matters is that bouncing all deployments one after another is inconvenient and I don’t like typing.

The best way to bounce (kubectl >= 1.15) ๐Ÿ”—

I recently found out from a friend that there is an easier way as of kubectl 1.15+. Restarting all the pods in a namespace is as easy as running the following kubectl command.

kubectl -n {NAMESPACE} rollout restart deploy

The old way (kubectl <= 1.14) ๐Ÿ”—

In older versions of kubectl you needed to run a command for each deployment in the namespace. In true lazy developer fashion I wrote a little script that will do it for me:

deploys=`kubectl -n $1 get deployments | tail -n +2 | cut -d ' ' -f 1`
for deploy in $deploys; do
  kubectl -n $1 rollout restart deployments/$deploy
done

It’s fairly simple to use. Assuming I named the script kubebounce.sh:

./kubebounce.sh {NAMESPACE}

I made a little open-source repo with installation instructions if you want to add it to your $PATH. Be sure to star the repo if you find it useful.

How It Works ๐Ÿ”—

Bash isn’t exactly the easiest language to read. Let’s go over each portion of the script.

deploys=`kubectl -n $1 get deployments | tail -n +2 | cut -d ' ' -f 1`

In bash, $1 refers to the first command-line argument, the namespace in our case. In essence, this line gets all the deployments in the target namespaces and saves them into a deploys variable. We pipe the output of the kubectl get deployments command into a tail -n +2 command, which just strips off the first line of the output. Then we run that output through a cut command which leaves us with a nice list of all the deployment names.

That’s the trickier part, next we just loop over all the deployments and restart them one by one:

for deploy in $deploys; do
  kubectl -n $1 rollout restart deployments/$deploy
done

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