Namespace stuck in Terminating - Kubernetes

Occasionally you may find that having issued a kubectl delete namespace yournamespace command, the namespace gets stuck in Terminating state, and is never actually deleted.

Here is a one liner, using jq that will alter the namespace to allow kubernetes to remove it:

kubectl get namespace yournamespace -o json | jq 'del(.spec.finalizers[] | select(. == "kubernetes"))' | kubectl replace --raw "/api/v1/namespaces/yournamespace/finalize" -f -

Replace yournamespace for the namespace you want to delete (appears twice in the line).

Or wrap it in a shell function, I’ll leave that as an exercise for you, dear reader.