phpMyAdmin provides Droplet owners with a user-friendly interface for MySQL database management.

But, sometimes Droplet owners need to uninstall phpMyAdmin, because it’s unusable, outdated, or unnecessary.

At Bobcares, we often receive requests from users to uninstall phpMyAdmin on their DigitalOcean Droplets as part of our Managed Cloud Services.

Today, we’ll discuss the steps to uninstall phpMyAdmin in DigitalOcean Droplets and the common errors that can occur.

Uninstall phpMyAdmin in DigitalOcean – How to do it?

DigitaOcean control panel doesn’t provide the feature to uninstall this application, so Droplet owners should manually uninstall phpMyAdmin from commandline.

Now, let’s see the steps to uninstall phpMyAdmin in a Droplet.

a) On Ubuntu Droplet

Uninstalling phpMyAdmin depends on the method used to install it in the Droplet.

That is, Ubunutu Droplet owners usually install phpMyAdmin from Ubuntu repository or install it from source.

So, our Hosting Engineers first analyze how phpMyAdmin application is installed on the Droplet.

We use the below command to uninstall phpMyadmin, if it is installed from the Ubuntu repository.

sudo apt-get remove --purge phpmyadmin

This will uninstall and remove all phpMyAdmin data and removes the configuration added to the web server configuration file.

Further, if we want to completely remove phpMyAdmin, we need to remove the phpMyAdmin database as well.

But, be careful while deleting this database.

Because, it removes any phpMyAdmin specific databases from your MySQL server.

Similarly, we check if this application is installed manually by extracting the files to the web server directory.

In such cases, our Hosting Engineers manually delete all the related files of phpMyAdmin.

b) On Debian Droplet

Our Support Engineers use the below commands to uninstall phpMyAdmin application in Debian systems.

sudo dpkg-P phpmyadmin
sudo rm -f /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf
service apache2 restart

Alternatively, in some cases we use the below command to remove the phpMyAdmin application.

sudo apt-get autoremove phpmyadmin

The  auto-remove option removes dependencies of the package that are no longer needed.

Sometimes, dpkg won’t purge the phpMyAdmin files completely.

In such cases, our Hosting Engineers manually remove the phpMyAdmin folder using the below command.

sudo rm -rf /usr/share/phpmyadmin

[Do you need help uninstalling phpMyAdmin in your DigitaOcean Droplet? Our Support Experts can assist you here.]

Uninstall phpMyAdmin in DigitalOcean – Common failure points

Removing phpMyAdmin on your Droplet is a technical task, so don’t go for it, if you’re not confident.

Now, let’s see where things can go wrong when you uninstall phpMyadmin.

1) Using wrong command

Recently, an Ubuntu Droplet owner has removed the phpMyAdmin application from his Droplet, but he can still access that application.

Here, our Hosting Engineers have identified that the phpMyadmin application has been partially removed by the customer.

From the server history, we identified that customer used the below command to uninstall the application.

sudo apt-get remove phpmyadmin

This only removes the phpmyadmin package and doesn’t remove its configuration.

So, our Support Engineers use the purge option to completely remove phpMyAdmin, including it’s configuration files.

2) Due to broken packages

Another common error that occurs while removing phpMyAdmin is given below.

Errors were encountered while processing:
phpmyadmin
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Here, we have tried to remove and purge phpMyAdmin, but we also get the same error.

From the server logs, we identified this is due to the broken phpMyAdmin package.

So, our Hosting Engineers manually remove the phpMyAdmin files from the location /var/lib/dpkg/info/ to fix the problem.

[And, do you need help to fix this error? Our Database experts will fix that in minutes.]

3) Wrong uninstall method

Sometimes, Droplet owners get the below error, when using apt-get command to uninstall phpMyAdmin.

E: Unable to locate package phphmyadmin

This error occurs when the application is installed from source, but customer doesn’t follow the correct uninstall procedure.

So, our Hosting Engineers, first grab the package information and verify whether it is installed from source or from repository.

If it is installed from source, we read the uninstall file and follow the steps given in the file to remove it manually.

[Are you stuck with this error message? Click here to contact our Cloud Experts. We are online 24/7.]

Conclusion

In short, uninstalling phpMyAdmin on DigitaOcean servers is purely a technical task. Today, we’ve discussed the steps to uninstall phpMyAdmin in Debian and Ubuntu Droplets. Also, we’ve discussed the common problems that can occur while uninstalling phpMyAdmin and how our Cloud Experts fix it.