Python Uninstall/Remove All Packages Installed By pip
Let’s look at a couple of quick ways to uninstall all the packages that we installed with pip
in our environment or system.
First of all, to list all the packages that were installed via pip
(in requirements format):
$ pip freeze
If we can list all the packages installed, then we can pass that list to pip uninstall
to uninstall all of them:
$ pip uninstall -y -r <(pip freeze) # <() is known as process substitution
Uninstalling...
You could of course save the list to a separate file if you wanted to:
$ pip freeze > requirements.txt
$ pip uninstall -y -r requirements.txt
Using xargs
also works:
$ pip freeze | xargs pip uninstall -y
If you have packages installed via VCS (Github, GitLab, Bitbucket, etc.), then you will have to uninstall them manually. Although make sure while deleting the non-VCS packages, you exclude the VCS ones from the pip freeze
list so that pip uninstall
doesn’t complain. Exclusion can be done with grep -v PATTERN
(feel free to chose the search pattern accordingly):
# List all packages and filter those without "git+"
$ pip freeze | grep -v 'git+' | xargs pip uninstall -y
Tip: If your packages are installed in site.USER_SITE
(user-site), then you can use the --user
option to list packages in all the examples above:
# To list packages from user-site only
$ pip freeze --user
# Sample usage for uninstallation:
$ pip freeze --user | xargs pip uninstall -y