How to uninstall a package installed with pip install --user

Question

There is a --user option for pip which can install a Python package per user   pip install --user  python-package-name    I used this option to install a package on a server for which I do not have root access  What I need now is to uninstall the installed package on the current user  I tried to execute this command   pip uninstall --user  python-package-name    But I got   no such option  --user   How can I uninstall a package that I installed with pip install --user  other than manually finding and deleting the package   I ve found this article   pip cannot uninstall from per-user site-packages directory  which describes that uninstalling packages from user directory does not supported  According to the article if it was implemented correctly then with  pip uninstall  package-name    the package that was installed will be also searched in user directories  But a problem still remains for me  What if the same package was installed both system-wide and per-user  What if someone needs to target a specific user directory

User · Accepted Answer

Having tested this using Python 3 5 and pip 7 1 2 on Linux  the situation appears to be this    pip install --user somepackage installs to  HOME  local  and uninstalling it does work using pip uninstall somepackage  This is true whether or not somepackage is also installed system-wide at the same time  If the package is installed at both places  only the local one will be uninstalled  To uninstall the package system-wide using pip  first uninstall it locally  then run the same uninstall command again  with root privileges  In addition to the predefined user install directory  pip install --target somedir somepackage will install the package into somedir  There is no way to uninstall a package from such a place using pip   But there is a somewhat old unmerged pull request on Github that implements pip uninstall --target   Since the only places pip will ever uninstall from are system-wide and predefined user-local  you need to run pip uninstall as the respective user to uninstall from a given user s local install directory

User · Answer

I strongly recommend you to use virtual environments for python package installation  With virtualenv  you prevent any package conflict and total isolation from your python related userland commands  To delete all your package follow this  It s possible to uninstall packages installed with --user flag  This one worked for me  pip freeze --user   xargs pip uninstall -y For python 3  pip3 freeze --user   xargs pip3 uninstall -y But somehow these commands don t uninstall setuptools and pip  After those commands  if you really want clean python  you may delete them with  pip uninstall setuptools  amp  amp  pip uninstall pip

User · Answer

Be careful though  for those who using pip install --user some pkg inside a virtual environment     path to python -m venv   my py venv   source   my py venv bin activate  my py venv    pip install --user some pkg  my py venv    pip uninstall some pkg WARNING  Skipping some pkg as it is not installed   my py venv    pip list   Even  pip list  will not properly list the  some pkg  in this case   In this case  you have to deactivate the current virtual environment  then use the corresponding python pip executable to list or uninstall the user site packages    my py venv    deactivate   path to python -m pip list   path to python -m pip uninstall some pkg   Note that this issue was reported few years ago  And it seems that the current conclusion is  --user is not valid inside a virtual env s pip  since a user location doesn t really make sense for a virtual environment

User · Answer

example to uninstall package  oauth2client  on MacOS   pip uninstall oauth2client

User · Answer

I am running Anaconda version 4 3 22 and a python3 6 1 environment  and had this problem  Here s the history and the fix   pip uninstall opencv-python   -- the original step  failed   ImportError  DLL load failed  The specified module could not be found    I did this into my python3 6 environment and got this error   python -m pip install opencv-python   same package as above  conda install -c conda-forge opencv   separate install parallel to opencv pip-install opencv-contrib-python   suggested by another user here  doesn t resolve it    Next  I tried downloading python3 6 and putting the python3 dll in the folder and in various folders  nothing changed    finally  this fixed it       pip uninstall opencv-python    the other conda-forge version is still installed  This left only the conda version  and that works in 3 6     gt  gt  gt import cv2  gt  gt  gt    working

User · Answer

The answer is Not possible yet  You have to remove it manually

User · Answer

As  thomas-lotze has mentioned  currently pip tooling does not do that as there is no corresponding --user option   But what I find is that I can check in    local bin and look for the specific pip    which looks to me like it corresponds to the --user option   In my case   antho noctil     l bin  pwd  home antho  local bin antho noctil     l bin  ls pip  pip  pip2  pip2 7  pip3  pip3 5   And then just uninstall with the specific pip version

[python] How to uninstall a package installed with pip install --user

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