How do you uninstall a python package that was installed using distutils

Question

Can you simply delete the directory from your python installation  or are there any lingering files that you must delete

User · Accepted Answer

It varies based on the options that you pass to install and the contents of the distutils configuration files on the system/in the package. I don't believe that any files are modified outside of directories specified in these ways.

Notably, distutils does not have an uninstall command at this time.

It's also noteworthy that deleting a package/egg can cause dependency issues – utilities like easy_install attempt to alleviate such problems.

User · Answer

Yes  it is safe to simply delete anything that distutils installed  That goes for installed folders or  egg files  Naturally anything that depends on that code will no longer work    If you want to make it work again  simply re-install    By the way  if you are using distutils also consider using the multi-version feature  It allows you to have multiple versions of any single package installed  That means you do not need to delete an old version of a package if you simply want to install a newer version

User · Answer

If this is for testing and or development purposes  setuptools has a develop command that updates every time you make a change  so you don t have to uninstall and reinstall every time you make a change    And you can uninstall the package using this command as well   If you do use this  anything that you declare as a script will be left behind as a lingering file

User · Answer

The three things that get installed that you will need to delete are    Packages modules Scripts Data files   Now on my linux system these live in     usr lib python2 5 site-packages  usr bin  usr share   But on a windows system they are more likely to be entirely within the Python distribution directory  I have no idea about OSX except it is more likey to follow the linux pattern

User · Answer

Another time stamp based hack    Create an anchor  touch  tmp ts Reinstall the package to be removed  python setup py install --prefix  lt PREFIX gt  Remove files what are more recent than the anchor file  find  lt PREFIX gt  -cnewer  tmp ts   xargs rm -r

User · Answer

ERROR  flake8 3 7 9 has requirement pycodestyle lt 2 6 0  gt  2 5 0  but you ll have pycodestyle 2 3 1 which is incompatible  ERROR  nuscenes-devkit 1 0 8 has requirement motmetrics lt  1 1 3  but you ll have motmetrics 1 2 0 which is incompatible  Installing collected packages  descartes  future  torch  cachetools  torchvision  flake8-import-order  xmltodict  entrypoints  flake8  motmetrics  nuscenes-devkit   Attempting uninstall  torch     Found existing installation  torch 1 0 0     Uninstalling torch-1 0 0        Successfully uninstalled torch-1 0 0   Attempting uninstall  torchvision     Found existing installation  torchvision 0 2 1     Uninstalling torchvision-0 2 1        Successfully uninstalled torchvision-0 2 1   Attempting uninstall  entrypoints     Found existing installation  entrypoints 0 2 3 ERROR  Cannot uninstall  entrypoints   It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall    Then I type    conda uninstall entrypoints pip install --upgrade pycodestyle pip install nuscenes-devkit   Done

User · Answer

The three things that get installed that you will need to delete are    Packages modules Scripts Data files   Now on my linux system these live in     usr lib python2 5 site-packages  usr bin  usr share   But on a windows system they are more likely to be entirely within the Python distribution directory  I have no idea about OSX except it is more likey to follow the linux pattern

User · Answer

If this is for testing and or development purposes  setuptools has a develop command that updates every time you make a change  so you don t have to uninstall and reinstall every time you make a change    And you can uninstall the package using this command as well   If you do use this  anything that you declare as a script will be left behind as a lingering file

User · Answer

If this is for testing and or development purposes  setuptools has a develop command that updates every time you make a change  so you don t have to uninstall and reinstall every time you make a change    And you can uninstall the package using this command as well   If you do use this  anything that you declare as a script will be left behind as a lingering file

User · Answer

The three things that get installed that you will need to delete are    Packages modules Scripts Data files   Now on my linux system these live in     usr lib python2 5 site-packages  usr bin  usr share   But on a windows system they are more likely to be entirely within the Python distribution directory  I have no idea about OSX except it is more likey to follow the linux pattern

User · Answer

Another time stamp based hack    Create an anchor  touch  tmp ts Reinstall the package to be removed  python setup py install --prefix  lt PREFIX gt  Remove files what are more recent than the anchor file  find  lt PREFIX gt  -cnewer  tmp ts   xargs rm -r

User · Answer

On Mac OSX  manually delete these 2 directories under your pathToPython site-packages  will work      packageName   packageName - version -info   for example  to remove pyasn1  which is a distutils installed project    rm -rf lib python2 7 site-packages pyasn1 rm -rf lib python2 7 site-packages pyasn1-0 1 9-py2 7 egg-info   To find out where is your site-packages   python -m site

User · Answer

I just uninstalled a python package  and even though I m not certain I did so perfectly  I m reasonably confident     I started by getting a list of all python-related files  ordered by date  on the assumption that all of the files in my package will have more or less the same timestamp  and no other files will   Luckily  I ve got python installed under  opt Python-2 6 1  if I had been using the Python that comes with my Linux distro  I d have had to scour all of  usr  which would have taken a long time   Then I just examined that list  and noted with relief that all the stuff that I wanted to nuke consisted of one directory   opt Python-2 6 1 lib python2 6 site-packages module-name   and one file   opt Python-2 6 1 lib python2 6 site-packages module-x x x blah-py2 6 egg-info   So I just deleted those   Here s how I got the date-sorted list of files   find      -printf   T    -ls   sort -n   cut -d   -f 2-   I think that s got to be GNU  find   by the way  the flavor you get on OS X doesn t know about  -printf   T      I use that all the time

User · Answer

If this is for testing and or development purposes  setuptools has a develop command that updates every time you make a change  so you don t have to uninstall and reinstall every time you make a change    And you can uninstall the package using this command as well   If you do use this  anything that you declare as a script will be left behind as a lingering file

User · Answer

In ubuntu 12 04  I have found that the only place you need to look by default is under   usr local lib python2 7    And simply remove the associated folder and file  if there is one

User · Answer

Yes  it is safe to simply delete anything that distutils installed  That goes for installed folders or  egg files  Naturally anything that depends on that code will no longer work    If you want to make it work again  simply re-install    By the way  if you are using distutils also consider using the multi-version feature  It allows you to have multiple versions of any single package installed  That means you do not need to delete an old version of a package if you simply want to install a newer version

User · Answer

install --record   xargs rm  sudo python setup py install --record files txt xargs sudo rm -rf  lt  files txt   removes all files and but leaves empty directories behind   That is not ideal  it should be enough to avoid package conflicts   And then you can finish the job manually if you want by reading files txt  or be braver and automate empty directory removal as well   A safe helper would be   python-setup-uninstall       sudo rm -f files txt   sudo python setup py install --record files txt  amp  amp      xargs rm -rf  lt  files txt   sudo rm -f files txt     Tested in Python 2 7 6  Ubuntu 14 04

User · Answer

I just uninstalled a python package  and even though I m not certain I did so perfectly  I m reasonably confident     I started by getting a list of all python-related files  ordered by date  on the assumption that all of the files in my package will have more or less the same timestamp  and no other files will   Luckily  I ve got python installed under  opt Python-2 6 1  if I had been using the Python that comes with my Linux distro  I d have had to scour all of  usr  which would have taken a long time   Then I just examined that list  and noted with relief that all the stuff that I wanted to nuke consisted of one directory   opt Python-2 6 1 lib python2 6 site-packages module-name   and one file   opt Python-2 6 1 lib python2 6 site-packages module-x x x blah-py2 6 egg-info   So I just deleted those   Here s how I got the date-sorted list of files   find      -printf   T    -ls   sort -n   cut -d   -f 2-   I think that s got to be GNU  find   by the way  the flavor you get on OS X doesn t know about  -printf   T      I use that all the time

User · Answer

for Python in Windows   python -m pip uninstall  package keyword  uninstall       y n

User · Answer

For Windows 7   Control Panel --  Programs --  Uninstall    then   choose the python package to remove

User · Answer

Yes  it is safe to simply delete anything that distutils installed  That goes for installed folders or  egg files  Naturally anything that depends on that code will no longer work    If you want to make it work again  simply re-install    By the way  if you are using distutils also consider using the multi-version feature  It allows you to have multiple versions of any single package installed  That means you do not need to delete an old version of a package if you simply want to install a newer version

User · Answer

ERROR  flake8 3 7 9 has requirement pycodestyle lt 2 6 0  gt  2 5 0  but you ll have pycodestyle 2 3 1 which is incompatible  ERROR  nuscenes-devkit 1 0 8 has requirement motmetrics lt  1 1 3  but you ll have motmetrics 1 2 0 which is incompatible  Installing collected packages  descartes  future  torch  cachetools  torchvision  flake8-import-order  xmltodict  entrypoints  flake8  motmetrics  nuscenes-devkit   Attempting uninstall  torch     Found existing installation  torch 1 0 0     Uninstalling torch-1 0 0        Successfully uninstalled torch-1 0 0   Attempting uninstall  torchvision     Found existing installation  torchvision 0 2 1     Uninstalling torchvision-0 2 1        Successfully uninstalled torchvision-0 2 1   Attempting uninstall  entrypoints     Found existing installation  entrypoints 0 2 3 ERROR  Cannot uninstall  entrypoints   It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall    Then I type    conda uninstall entrypoints pip install --upgrade pycodestyle pip install nuscenes-devkit   Done

User · Answer

In ubuntu 12 04  I have found that the only place you need to look by default is under   usr local lib python2 7    And simply remove the associated folder and file  if there is one

User · Answer

The three things that get installed that you will need to delete are    Packages modules Scripts Data files   Now on my linux system these live in     usr lib python2 5 site-packages  usr bin  usr share   But on a windows system they are more likely to be entirely within the Python distribution directory  I have no idea about OSX except it is more likey to follow the linux pattern

User · Answer

For Windows 7   Control Panel --  Programs --  Uninstall    then   choose the python package to remove

User · Answer

install --record   xargs rm  sudo python setup py install --record files txt xargs sudo rm -rf  lt  files txt   removes all files and but leaves empty directories behind   That is not ideal  it should be enough to avoid package conflicts   And then you can finish the job manually if you want by reading files txt  or be braver and automate empty directory removal as well   A safe helper would be   python-setup-uninstall       sudo rm -f files txt   sudo python setup py install --record files txt  amp  amp      xargs rm -rf  lt  files txt   sudo rm -f files txt     Tested in Python 2 7 6  Ubuntu 14 04

User · Answer

for Python in Windows   python -m pip uninstall  package keyword  uninstall       y n

User · Answer

Yes  it is safe to simply delete anything that distutils installed  That goes for installed folders or  egg files  Naturally anything that depends on that code will no longer work    If you want to make it work again  simply re-install    By the way  if you are using distutils also consider using the multi-version feature  It allows you to have multiple versions of any single package installed  That means you do not need to delete an old version of a package if you simply want to install a newer version

User · Answer

On Mac OSX  manually delete these 2 directories under your pathToPython site-packages  will work      packageName   packageName - version -info   for example  to remove pyasn1  which is a distutils installed project    rm -rf lib python2 7 site-packages pyasn1 rm -rf lib python2 7 site-packages pyasn1-0 1 9-py2 7 egg-info   To find out where is your site-packages   python -m site

[python] How do you uninstall a python package that was installed using distutils?

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