How to uninstall a package installed with pip install --user

Having tested this using Python 3.5 and pip 7.1.2 on Linux, the situation appears to be this:

• pip install --user somepackage installs to $HOME/.local, and uninstalling it does work using pip uninstall somepackage.

• This is true whether or not somepackage is also installed system-wide at the same time.

• If the package is installed at both places, only the local one will be uninstalled. To uninstall the package system-wide using pip, first uninstall it locally, then run the same uninstall command again, with root privileges.

• In addition to the predefined user install directory, pip install --target somedir somepackage will install the package into somedir. There is no way to uninstall a package from such a place using pip. (But there is a somewhat old unmerged pull request on Github that implements pip uninstall --target.)

• Since the only places pip will ever uninstall from are system-wide and predefined user-local, you need to run pip uninstall as the respective user to uninstall from a given user's local install directory.

example to uninstall package 'oauth2client' on MacOS:

pip uninstall oauth2client

Be careful though, for those who using pip install --user some_pkg inside a virtual environment.

$ path/to/python -m venv ~/my_py_venv$ source ~/my_py_venv/bin/activate(my_py_venv) $ pip install --user some_pkg(my_py_venv) $ pip uninstall some_pkgWARNING: Skipping some_pkg as it is not installed.(my_py_venv) $ pip list# Even `pip list` will not properly list the `some_pkg` in this case

In this case, you have to deactivate the current virtual environment, then use the corresponding python/pip executable to list or uninstall the user site packages:

(my_py_venv) $ deactivate$ path/to/python -m pip list$ path/to/python -m pip uninstall some_pkg

Note that this issue was reported few years ago. And it seems that the current conclusion is: --user is not valid inside a virtual env's pip, since a user location doesn't really make sense for a virtual environment.