How can I 'clean up' a virtualenv?

Question

If I want to keep my venv as clean as possible how can I clean up the stuff I don't need? Let me lay out an example...

Say I try a bunch of new modules...

pip install foo
pip install bar
pip install foobar
pip install foobarfoo

and these modules have some requirements of their own, etc. later I decide on which one I want to use, but then I have a huge list of stuff in my requirement.txt and I can't remember what I need and what I don't, what depends on what, etc.

How can I keep it clean and lean?

the whole point is I am not sure of what I need based on dependencies. Of course I could delete the whole thing, let my processes fail and install as I go, but I am looking for an easier way — Joff, Jan 29 '16 at 04:26

score 46 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 07 '20 at 12:32

46

To uninstall every package (including dependencies) you can freeze the requirements and then pass them to pip uninstall:

pip freeze > to-uninstall.txt
pip uninstall -r to-uninstall.txt

answered Apr 07 '20 at 12:32

Steve Rossiter

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That is the best thing I have seen all week. Thanks!!! – Jim Bray May 10 '21 at 01:49
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This is a great solution. However, for larger virtual environments it can be annoying to have to confirm the removal of each package. In that event, I'd recommend using: `pip uninstall -y -r to-uninstall.txt` which bypasses the prompt – James Rocker Dec 22 '21 at 10:56

Artur Barseghyan · Answer 2 · 2023-07-27T07:10:34.200

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The following works for me (can be executed from any Python 3.6 virtualenv):

virtualenv --clear your-env-name

Where your-env-name could be:

Path to the virtual environment (relative from current directory or absolute)
Or if you use virtualenv-wrapper, just the name of the environment

If that doesn't work for you somehow, there's is this less convenient one-liner:

pip freeze | while read p; do pip uninstall -y "$p"; done

edited Jul 27 '23 at 07:10

answered Dec 13 '19 at 21:32

Artur Barseghyan

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"Delete the contents of the environment directory if it already exists, before environment creation." – Mattwmaster58 Mar 05 '22 at 08:40
that didn't work for me... – Liker777 May 03 '23 at 18:51
Error: [Errno 40] Too many levels of symbolic links: [path to the venv] – Liker777 May 03 '23 at 18:55
@Liker777: I just checked. It still works fine on Python 3.10. What did you do? System, full command? – Artur Barseghyan May 03 '23 at 19:49

score 9 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

9

This answer may be just what you need.

You can install and use the pip-autoremove utility to remove a package plus unused dependencies.
# install pip-autoremove 
pip install pip-autoremove
# remove "somepackage" plus its dependencies: 
pip-autoremove somepackage -y

edited May 23 '17 at 12:16

Community

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answered Jan 29 '16 at 02:39

Brendan Abel

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Don't forget to remove pip-autoremove when done! :-> – aghast Jan 29 '16 at 03:48
Why would I remove pip autoremove when I am done instead of just leaving it there for future use? – Joff Jan 29 '16 at 04:26
I wonder if pip uninstall wouldn't do... When I'm removing with pip-autoremove, there are some dependencies which pip-autoremove cannot deal with (it seems that the order of deleting is important) while pip uninstall works fine. – fanny Jun 28 '17 at 13:56
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@fanny pip uninstall doesn't remove any dependencies at all. – Brendan Abel Jul 03 '17 at 04:58

score 8 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 11 '22 at 14:27

Following the answers from @Steve Rossiter and @James Rocker one could also do a trivial modification and avoid generating a temp file in a one-liner like:

pip uninstall -y -r <(pip freeze)

(I wanted to post this as a comment on the answer, but I don't have enough reputation for that.)

score 7 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 05 '21 at 10:12

You can use pip-tools's pip-sync functionality to keep your environment clean.

From pip-tools' documentation:

Now that you have a requirements.txt, you can use pip-sync to update your virtual environment to reflect exactly what's in there. This will install/upgrade/uninstall everything necessary to match the requirements.txt contents.

Just install pip-tools and call the pip-sync command:

pip install pip-tools
pip-sync requirements.txt

(side note: pip-tools is also great to manage you dependency versions to make your builds predictable and deterministic; see pip-tools' documentation for more information)

score 7 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 15 '21 at 17:21

7

To slightly improve on another answer

Use pip but add -y to avoid prompts for every library.

Don't forget to remove the file "to_uninstall.txt" when done!

pip freeze > to_uninstall.txt
pip uninstall -y -r to_uninstall.txt

answered Jul 15 '21 at 17:21

RLNYC

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score 2 · Answer 7 · edited Jan 15 '22 at 02:32

2

pip freeze | xargs pip uninstall -y

(Inspired by Tripp Kinetics' answer)

edited Jan 15 '22 at 02:32

Gino Mempin

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answered Jan 15 '22 at 02:25

Paul

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score 1 · Answer 8 · answered Nov 29 '21 at 15:56

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I just wrote a one-liner for this:

pip list | tail +3 | cut -f1 -d\  | xargs pip uninstall -y

Afterwards, you probably would want to:

python -m ensurepip --upgrade

To get pip back.

answered Nov 29 '21 at 15:56

Tripp Kinetics

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score 0 · Answer 9 · answered Oct 20 '22 at 11:13

0

You can use this command to uninstall all packages easily

pip uninstall -y $(pip freeze)

answered Oct 20 '22 at 11:13

Msvstl

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score -1 · Answer 10 · answered Dec 23 '19 at 09:03

-1

pip uninstall followed by one or more package names will remove the packages from the virtual environment.

Python Documentation

answered Dec 23 '19 at 09:03

sujit

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How can I 'clean up' a virtualenv?

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