Should renaming a hostname clean up old records?

[mwarkentin]

Hi, I'm just trying out External DNS.

We're using the google provider, and I'm doing some testing.

I've gotten record creation working, but I noticed when I changed the hostname in the annotation, the new record was created, but the old record was left around.

Should it be cleaned up?

Details

1. Added service annotation: external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname: relay-ext.*.*.internal
2. DNS record was created as expected

3. Updated service annotation: `external-dns.alpha.kubernetes.io/hostname: relay-int.*.*.internal` 4. New DNS record was created as expected, however the previous record was not deleted

Operator logs (current loop):

external-dns-5f7945656c-x9rfn time="2025-08-01T15:17:17Z" level=warning msg="Got error while parsing domain _dmarc.*.*.internal: idna: disallowed rune U+005F"
external-dns-5f7945656c-x9rfn time="2025-08-01T15:17:17Z" level=warning msg="Got error while parsing domain *._domainkey.*.*.internal: idna: disallowed rune U+002A"
external-dns-5f7945656c-x9rfn time="2025-08-01T15:17:17Z" level=info msg="All records are already up to date"

The warnings seem unrelated.

[uozalp]

@mwarkentin Looks like you’re using the default upsert-only policy. That mode creates/updates records but doesn’t delete old ones, which is why the previous record stayed.

If you want cleanup, switch to: --policy=sync