How do I completely clean-up or reset a Python installation on Ubuntu

user_7116820 0
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Package management and juggling pip, anaconda, PPAs, and virtual-environments is difficult. Somewhere in my constellation of dependencies, things are broken. I'm on Ubuntu 18.04. As far as I know, I cannot fix these dependencies by hand.

The problem, for what it's worth: I've been unable to use tensorflow for a few months. Every time I try to fix it, even uninstalling and reinstalling everything to the best of my knowledge, things still don't work. After sinking enough hours, I'm looking for a "nuclear solution".

What I would like to do is cleanly remove everything except Python and any Python packages my system might require, so that I can start fresh (and hopefully do things properly.)

So, my question: How can I systematically clean up or remove my Python installation? I want to wipe everything and start anew. Does there exist a systematic guide, or a smart and reputable script that does this?

anaconda pip apt python
3 Answers

Helpful and cautionary tale, be a good idea not to delete it I think... I'll assume it was the profanity that got it deleted so I've edited it out.

!!!! WARNING !!!!

If you're like me and you think ah shur I'll do an 'apt list --installed | grep -i python' and then 'apt purge -y' all that crap, well, maybe don't.

Now my entire system is doo-doo. It all seemed fine until I rebooted and now there is no network connection, netplan and a bunch of other stuff is just gone. No recovery possible.

Actually it looks like it was an 'apt autoremove' AFTER I'd done the above that actually removed netplan.

And all because I wanted to remove multiple python versions to get over those gosh darn import issues and messin' around with pip and pip3 and pip3432432 and what gosh flippin' version of python is tied to what oody doody version of pip...

UPDATE - This video helped me recover me files https://youtu.be/tGIPeWkPkMc

user_21316210

You can try sudo apt purge python-pip python-dev, or python3 and python3-pip if you're using Python 3. This must remove all files/folders created by the installed packages. But I'm not really sure you need to do it.

The better solution is just to uninstall all pip packages, like pip freeze | xargs pip uninstall -y. Just to be sure you can even remove pip folder /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages manually (or similar folder for Python 3).

user_15984700

(Extending @jay 's warning)

"Out of the Box", later Ubuntu versions have a system dependency on Python(3). For instance, my Ubuntu 20.04 runs "networkd-dispather" and "unattended-upgrade-shutdown". I've seen similar on various Cloud instances. Kali 2020 uses python to run a printer daemon. Check your system first. Or even try it on a VM similar to your system.

Try a quick check before doing something drastic.

ps aux | grep python

That will give you an idea if services are being run by Python. Frankly, I like the pip3 freeze to list the installed packages and cleanup from that list, like @sortas suggests in the second half of his answer.

user_4553220
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