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]

👍 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

[patrickmburrell]

+1 for uninject

[itsayellow]

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.

What about making the default to remove dependencies of an uninjected app, but allow for the possibility to leave the dependencies alone (e.g. --leave-deps)

I like this better for the pipx use case. In fact I can't really imagine why a pipx user would want to leave the dependencies behind. It's not the same as a generic venv where the user is adding and removing random packages. In the pipx case, a user may inject a particular package because they want that functionality, but it doesn't seem likely to me that if they decide against that functionality and uninject, that it would be common to want to still use the dependencies of that package.

If they did want a particular dependency of an injected package they could inject that dependency explicitly, which is the action I would expect. In which case we would leave it installed because our metadata shows it is an injected package.

I'm working on a branch right now for uninject, and the above is how I've implemented it. It works very cleanly so far.

[Sispheor]

Hello people.
Where are we on this?
The command to remove via runpip works, but the package is still referenced then in the pipx list --include-injected

pipx runpip ansible-4 uninstall ansible-lint

pipx list --include-injected
 package ansible 4.9.0 (ansible-4), Python 3.8.5
    - ansible-4
    - ansible-config-4
    - ansible-connection-4
    - ansible-console-4
    - ansible-doc-4
    - ansible-galaxy-4
    - ansible-inventory-4
    - ansible-playbook-4
    - ansible-pull-4
    - ansible-test-4
    - ansible-vault-4
    Injected Packages:
      - ansible-lint 5.3.2
      - ansible-modules-hashivault 4.6.5
      - hvac 0.10.14
      - kubernetes 20.13.0
      - python-ldap 3.4.0
      - pyvim 3.0.2
      - pyvmomi 7.0.2
      - vSphere-Automation-SDK 1.71.0

[cs01]

Matthew is no longer able to dedicate time to pipx, so I guess his branch will not be merged. PRs are welcome from the community.