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

Question

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.

example to uninstall package 'oauth2client' on MacOS:

pip uninstall oauth2client

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.

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 installed globally 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 && pip uninstall pip

Now you have clean python environment. You can create virtualenv and install the package inside them.

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