Linux – How to completely remove PHPStorm, and all associated files on Ubuntu 13.04

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After removing the Phpstorm directory from Ubuntu, future installation attempts do not actually install any more – no menu item appears under Applications in the top left, and running the "globally created executable (I presume the one added in /usr/bin?) just runs the installation again.

Clearly there are some files hanging over that I need to get rid of, but I don't know which ones.

I 'installed' Phpstorm on Ubuntu 13.04 by doing the following:

  • Installing Oracle JDK 8
  • Downloading the tar.gz file to my ~/Downloads dir and extracted in the same dir
  • Running bin/phpstorm.sh

I decided that I had installed it in the wrong location, so I ran the following to remove it:

rm -rf ~/Downloads/phpstorm-version-whatever

Now, I'm stuck with the issue described above. The Phpstorm forums do not actually contain any docs or other people with the same issue.

How can I completely remove Phpstorm from Ubuntu, and start again from scratch? What files do I need to remove that are specific to this software?

Best Answer

You usually can't uninstall files installed without your package manager by just deleting the directory you extracted, though this often is actually true of Java based archives.

I don't know phpstorm specifically, but I can give you some generic instructions.

The very first thing I'd recommend you do is check if phpstorm itself includes some kind of uninstall script. I'd guess you already did, though.

Failing that, you should open a terminal and type whereis phpstorm - this should tell you where most of the files associated with it are located. You could then try deleting them manually. /etc and /usr/share are also some likely places to look.

You could also search through the hidden files in your home folder for one called .phpstorm or the like. This would probably contain most of the configuration and I don't think would show up with the "whereis" command.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head if the shortcuts and the like are already gone, but it might do the job. This is a messy and ugly way of doing things and may well leave something behind - try to install with your package manager whenever possible.

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