Rancher Cluster Deletion

Prerequisites

A CAPI Cluster has been created and imported in Rancher as described in Provision a CAPI Workload Cluster.

Delete the imported cluster from Rancher

From your browser, access Rancher Manager → Cluster Management.
Locate the cluster to be deleted, click the three-dot menu (⋮) next to it, and select Delete.
Once the imported cluster is marked for deletion:
- Turtles controller will annotate the CAPI cluster with imported: true.
- This annotation prevents the cluster from being re-imported automatically by Rancher.
- Verify the annotation using the following command:
  kubectl -n capi-clusters get clusters.cluster.x-k8s.io cluster1 -o json | jq .metadata.annotations { "imported": "true" ... }

Deleting the Rancher cluster only removes the clusters.management.cattle.io resource and disables auto-import for the associated CAPI cluster. The underlying CAPI cluster iteself remains intact.

Re-import cluster

If you need to re-import the same CAPI cluster into Rancher:

Remove the imported: true annotation:

kubectl -n capi-clusters patch clusters.cluster.x-k8s.io <cluster-name> --type='json' -p='[{"op": "remove", "path": "/metadata/annotations/imported"}]'