kubectl-check-ownerreferences is a read-only tool that identifies objects with potentially problematic items in metadata.ownerReferences. See http://issue.k8s.io/65200 and http://issue.k8s.io/92743 for more context.

To download:

Pre-built binaries are available for the latest release for darwin and linux.

To install from source:

git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/kubectl-check-ownerreferences.git
cd kubectl-check-ownerreferences
make install

To use:

1. Ensure kubectl can speak to the cluster you want to check:

kubectl version

Client Version: ...
Server Version: ...

2. Invoke kubectl-check-ownerreferences, and it will read items from the same cluster as kubectl:

kubectl-check-ownerreferences 

No invalid ownerReferences found

Details

kubectl-check-ownerreferences does the following:

1. Discovers available resources in your cluster
2. Lists the metadata for each resource, building a set of existing objects in the cluster
3. Sweeps the ownerReferences for existing objects, and makes sure the referenced owners:
   1. exist
   2. have a matching kind
   3. have a matching name
   4. are in the correct namespace (or are cluster-scoped)
   5. are referenced via a resolveable apiVersion

Error handling

If some resources cannot be discovered or listed, kubectl-check-ownerreferences will output warnings to stderr and continue.

If some child objects have ownerReferences that refer to the undiscoverable or unlistable resources, warnings will be printed to stderr.

If parent objects are deleted or child objects are created while kubectl-check-ownerreferences is running, false positives can be reported.

Options

• Output machine-readable results to stdout with -o json

• Increase verbosity with --v (levels 2-9) to see more details about the requests being made

• Increase or decrease the speed with which API requests are made with --qps and --burst