How to uninstall editable packages with pip (installed with -e)

Question

At {virtualenv}/lib/python2.7/site-packages/ (if not using virtualenv then {system_dir}/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/)

• remove the egg file (e.g. distribute-0.6.34-py2.7.egg) if there is any
• from file easy-install.pth, remove the corresponding line (it should be a path to the source directory or of an egg file).

An easier way to do the same with the new version of setup_tools is to run the following:

python setup.py develop -u

Which basically does the same as what @glarrain describes in his answer.

Install a dev package use cmd:

pip install --editable .

Uninstall:

rm -r $(find . -name '*.egg-info')

---

Now you can use:

pip uninstall package_name 

or python setup.py develop --uninstall or python setup.py develop -u

It turns out that my installation was somehow corrupt.

I could find the entry in:

/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/easy-install.pth

To solve the problem I removed the line in the .pth file by hand!

import sys; sys.__plen = len(sys.path)
...
/absolute-path-to/horus  # <- I removed this line
...

This is a bug on debian/ubuntu linux using OS-installed pip (v8.1.1 for me), which is what you'll invoke with sudo pip even if you've upgraded pip (e.g. get-pip.py). See https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/4438

For a discussion on how to clean up see https://askubuntu.com/questions/173323/how-do-i-detect-and-remove-python-packages-installed-via-pip, though the solutions there are of the "remove everything" variety.

...pip packages [go] to /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages, and apt packages to /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages

...a few packages were installed in ~/.local/lib too.

For my system all I needed to remove was /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/{package_name}.egg-link

Simply uninstall the package you installed in 'editable' mode:

pip uninstall yourpackage

it works for recent pip-versions (at least >=19.1.1).