Pipx: Uninstall injected package

[schinckel]

Sometimes I want to uninstall an injected package: for instance, the latest release of tox means that detox is no longer required/supported.

Is there a way to do this?

pipx uninject tox detox

I wonder what the best name for that should be. exclude, expel and withdraw are all cute.

[schinckel]

In the meantime, you can do $HOME/.local/pipx/<x>/bin/pip uninstall <y>, but that's a bit messy.

[cs01]

The runpip command was added in 0.13 which can indirectly do this. Therefore I will close this issue since runpip is a decent workaround.

[simonw]

For the record, here's how to do that with runpip (since this issue thread came up first for me in a Google search):

pipx runpip name-of-my-environment uninstall name-of-package

[cs01]

I don't personally use pipx inject and was against it initially, but it's proven quite popular. I closed the issue pretty quickly because I'm biased, but I actually think pipx uninject might not be a bad idea. Reopening in case anyone else has thoughts on this.

[itsayellow]

:+1: for uninject

[cs01]

Let’s make uninject happen

[simonw]

I'd like uninject.

[uranusjr]

One caveat about uninject is it won’t uninstall dependencies of the injected package, since pip does not know how to do that. But that’s quite well-known at this point anyway so I don’t think it’s a blocker, just something to keep in mind that less-experienced users may have false hopes on.

Does pipx maintain a listed of injected packages in the metadata? We may be able to reconstruct the environment an clean up unneeded packages automatically as well.

[itsayellow]

That's a good point @uranusjr . The metadata indeed contains the main package and a list of all injected packages. It does not keep track of any incidentally-installed dependencies.

To find any dependencies to remove, we could

1. uninstall the injected package, and then
2. run pip list --not-required to find all packages that are not depended upon
3. From the --not-required list, remove the current main package and injected packages
4. Uninstall the remaining --not-required packages

[itsayellow]

I suppose one risk of the above is if the user did something more "manual" like using a runpip command to install something that we can't keep track of in the metadata.

[uranusjr]

Another approach would be to make the clean-up behaviour explicit to the user, a la apt autoremove. pipx uninject only uninstalls the injected package by default, not its dependencies, but shows a messages listing seemingly unneeded packages in the environment, promping the user to run pipx clean to uninstall them. uninject can also have a --clean flag that does this automatically, like apt remove --auto-remove.

[cs01]

Another approach would be to make the clean-up behaviour explicit to the user, _a la_ apt autoremove. pipx uninject only uninstalls the injected package by default, not its dependencies, but shows a messages listing seemingly unneeded packages in the environment, promping the user to run pipx clean to uninstall them. uninject can also have a --clean flag that does this automatically, like apt remove --auto-remove.

Agreed, I like this