Uninstalling Archivematica 1.0 or 1.1

[Chris Zaste]

Hello,

I am experimenting with Archivematica and I was wondering if it is possible to uninstall it from a computer?  I will be installing this program directly onto a hard drive so I cannot simply remove the virtual machine and start again if I would like to reinstall it.  Is there a way to uninstall it or would I have to completely clean off my hard drive in order to remove it?

Thanks,

Chris

[Courtney Mumma]

Hi Chris,

We're actually in the midst of some work on this... if you'll hold tight for a few more days, we'll follow up with some documentation about the upgrade/installation process.

Courtney

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Courtney C. Mumma, MAS/MLIS
Archivematica Product Manager/Systems Analyst 
Artefactual Systems, Inc.
604-527-2056

[Justin Simpson]

Hi,

Short answer:
It is possible to uninstall Archivematica 1.0, but it requires a bit of manual cleanup.  Uninstalling 1.1 will be a bit easier.

Long answer:

At Artefactual, we have installed, uninstalled and reinstalled Archivematica many times on the same machine, as part of the development process, and in testing our software packages.  It is possible to do, and is not that hard, but it depends on what you are trying to do. 

We always recommend reinstalling the operating system (by creating a new vm, or re-installing to bare metal from install media) when removing Archivematica, because that is generally easy to do in a production environment, and guarantees 100% reproducible results. 

Installing virtualbox on your machine, and then installing Archivematica into a vm, might take more time up front, but save you time in the long run.  Digital Preservation is all about the long run, isn't it?  :) 

For those of you who still want to, here are some notes I have taken while testing the un-install/reinstall process.  These will get added to our wiki with the Archivematica 1.1 release (very very soon now).

Archivematica 1.x is distributed as a set of 4 Ubuntu packages, but the bulk of what actually gets installed onto a system comes from the long list of dependenices.  Archivematica uses tools like ghostscript and ffmpeg to do normalization, fido and fits for file identification and characterization, and tools like MySQL, gearman and ElasticSearch internally to manage the workflow.  Each of these packages in turn has its own set of dependencies (c libraries, programming languages like Java and Python need to be at the right version, etc).

All of these tools and libraries get magically added to your system when you install Archivematica, using the power of the Ubuntu packaging system (actually the debian packaging sytem used by Ubuntu, dpkg/apt-get).  You can use that same packaging system to remove Archivematica, but getting rid of 100% of the dependencies is in some cases a bit trickier.

If you have installed from packages (apt-get install) you can use 'apt-get purge' on each of the archivematica packages to completely remove it from your system.  So:

sudo apt-get purge archivematica-mcp-server

sudo apt-get purge archivematica-mcp-client

sudo apt-get purge archivematica-dashboard

sudo apt-get purge archivematica-storage-service

This should remove all the Archivematica software, including configuration files.  You can check that the following directories are gone, and remove them manually if they are still there:

sudo rm -rf /var/archivematica/sharedDirectory
sudo rm -rf /etc/archivematica
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/archivematica
sudo rm -rf /etc/init/archivematica*
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/archivematica

You can then do:

sudo apt-get autoremove

Which will then remove most of the dependencies.  e.g. apache2, nginx, and other packages that are used by Archivematica, but might not be needed after Archivematica is removed. 

You probably will want to remove the Archivematica ppa's from your apt sources list.  These are the package repositories that Archivematica software is downloaded from (added with add-apt-repository in the installation instructions).  You can remove them with the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:archivematica/release
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:archivematica/externals
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:archivematica/daily
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:archivematica/externals-dev

Some of those commands will not do anything, it depends which ppa's you added to your system in the first place.

If you installed from source (git clone), then deleting the repository you downloaded, and running the 'sudo rm -rf' commands above will get rid of all the Archivematica source code on your computer.  It will not remove any dependencies.  You will have to manually remove packages you no longer want (using apt-get, aptitude or gui tools like synaptic).

At this point, you have probably deleted everything you want to.  There is a caveat, however.  Depending on what else is installed on your system, you may still have some dependencies installed that were not there before Archivematica was installed.  For example, installing Archivematica causes packages like MySQL and gearman to get installed.  These might be used by other software on your computer, and so the Ubuntu packaging system may decide not to remove them when you uninstall Archivematica. 

Archivematica makes use of a mysql database and an elasticsearch index.  Even if you uninstall those packages, the actual database files and elasticsearch index files may still be maintained on disk.  For the MySQL database, you can manually drop the database if this happens, or delete the files (stored by default at /var/lib/mysql/mcp ) if this happens. Removing ElasticSearch indexes can be done a couple of different ways, google for details.

Justin Simpson
Director of Archivematica Technical Services
www.artefactual.com
604-527-2056

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 2:33 PM, Chris Zaste <cez...@gmail.com> wrote: