How remove a program installed with distutils?

Question

I have installed a python application with this setup.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

from distutils.core import setup
from libyouandme import APP_NAME, APP_DESCRIPTION, APP_VERSION, APP_AUTHORS, APP_HOMEPAGE, APP_LICENSE

setup(
    name=APP_NAME.replace(" ","-").lower(),
    version=APP_VERSION,
    description=APP_DESCRIPTION,
    author="John G",
    author_email="[email protected]",
    url=APP_HOMEPAGE,
    license=APP_LICENSE,
    scripts=["youandme.py"],
    packages=["libyouandme"],
    data_files=[
        ('share/applications', ['youandme.desktop']),
        ('usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps', ['icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/you.png']),
        ('usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/apps', ['icons/hicolor/22x22/apps/you.png']),
        ('usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps', ['icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/you.png'])],
)

How can I remove this application from my ubuntu machine ?

Do I can do this with distutils ?

Answer 1

Install the checkinstall Ubuntu package. checkinstall monitors the installation procedure and creates a deb package. This lets you use regular package management commands to remove the software.

First, reinstall the candidate python module/package using checkinstall. Change directory to the directory containing the setup.py file of the candidate python module/package:

cd <PACKAGE_NAME>

Then:

sudo checkinstall -D --fstrans=no python setup.py install

This creates a .deb package, and installs the python module again. You'll be asked a few questions. The default answers should be fine. (But you might change the "name" of the .deb package, when the setup.py file is in a subdirectory of the python module, for example the "source" subdirectory.)

(The saved .deb package now captures how the python package installed itself, and dpkg can remove the python package.)

Then immediately remove the module:

sudo dpkg -r <PACKAGE_NAME>

PS. I've heard that some installation programs are not compatible with checkinstall, though I've never run into any problems myself.

Answer 2

AFAIK only pip allows to uninstall python modules, so if you don't have it installed, you can install it with

sudo easy_install pip

and then use pip to uninstall your module

sudo pip uninstall <module_name>

where module_name is the value passed in the name argument of the setup function.

Edit: just saw you tagged your question with "python-3.x", and there is no 3.x version for pip yet, so if you need to uninstall a python3.x module, this answer doesn't fit.

Answer 3

Since pip 8.0.0 running pip uninstall <package> does not work when <package> is something that was pre-installed by the OS (probably with python setup.py install).

The error message is:

Detected a distutils installed project ('<package>') which we cannot uninstall. The metadata provided by distutils does not contain a list of files which have been installed, so pip does not know which files to uninstall.

Instead of using pip to uninstall these packages you need to use the OS package manager instead.

So on Ubuntu: sudo apt-get remove python-<package> would remove it.

I've found two packages that have this problem: httplib2 and six, and the above trick helped me get by that error. Hope that others find this useful.