Orphaned ConfigMaps

This repository contains a script to identify orphaned ConfigMaps in a Kubernetes namespace. Orphaned ConfigMaps are those that are not referenced by any active Pods or containers within the namespace.

Deprecation notice

This repo is deprecated for https://github.com/yonahd/kor

Kor covers finding unused configmaps and many other resource. It also contains many other features and enhancements.

Prerequisites

Before running the script, make sure you have the following prerequisites installed:

• Python 3.x
• pip package installer

Installation

1. Clone this repository to your local machine:

   git clone https://github.com/yonahd/orphaned-configmaps.git

2. Change into the repository directory:

   cd orphaned-configmaps

3. Install the required Python dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage Examples

• To scan all namespaces for orphaned ConfigMaps:

  python get-orphaned-configmaps.py
  

• To specify one or more namespaces to scan for orphaned ConfigMaps:

  python get-orphaned-configmaps.py -n namespace1 namespace2
  

• To exclude specific namespaces from the scan:

  python get-orphaned-configmaps.py --exclude exclude_ns1 exclude_ns2
  

  Note: The --exclude flag cannot be used together with the -n/--namespace flag.

The script will display a table of orphaned ConfigMaps, if any are found.

Example output

         Unused Config Maps in Namespace: my-namespace         
┏━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
┃  # ┃ Config Map Name                                                 ┃
┡━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┩
│  1 │ unused-configmap-1                                              │
│  2 │ super-important-configmap                                       │
└────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Exceptions File

The exception file (exceptions.txt) is a file that allows you to define exceptions to the orphaned ConfigMap detection. Sometimes, not every ConfigMap exists for a direct pod reference.

For example, a ConfigMap like aws-auth in the kube-system namespace is necessary for configuring AWS authentication and is actively monitored by a Kubernetes-native application at runtime. Similarly, ConfigMaps can be used to pass data between different parts of your infrastructure.

The exception file follows the format:

config_map_name, namespace, explanation

• config_map_name: The name of the ConfigMap that is an exception.
• namespace: The namespace where the exception applies.
• explanation: An explanation or description of why this ConfigMap is considered an exception.

You can add exceptions to the exceptions.txt file to prevent the script from flagging those ConfigMaps as orphaned.

Caveat

The script looks at pods and containers, so if you are consuming it in a deployment that is scaled to 0 it will not be detected.