When setting up a deployment pipeline with Azure DevOps, I came across the following error:
A vault with the same name already exists in deleted state. You need to either recover or purge existing key vault. Follow this link https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2149745 for more information on soft delete.
The cause of the error was that after a previous attempt to deploy, I decided to clean up the resource groups I created, which included an Azure Key Vault. The result was a ‘soft deleted’ Key Vault, which marks the vault as deleted for a specified period (90 days by default). The vault can then be recovered before the retention period expires.
But how do I ‘hard delete’ my Key Vault? The answer is you must ‘purge’ the Key Vault, and it is pretty straightforward to do so via the Azure CLI.
# Log in to the Azure CLI
az login
# List all the soft deleted Key Vaults in the currrently selected subscription
az keyvault list-deleted
# Purge the Key Vault
az keyvault purge --name mykeyvault