As you are here reading this post, you may want to remove PPAs in Ubuntu. PPA stands for Personal Package Archive. It’s a software archiving method developed by Canonical.
Ubuntu has a service called Launchpad. It’s a platform that enables software developers to create and manage their PPAs. I have already discussed “What Are PPAs In Ubuntu? How Do PPAs Work?“. You can read that article if you want to know more details about PPA.
But in this post, I am going to show you four easy ways to remove PPAs in Ubuntu.
Remove PPAs In Ubuntu Using GUI
This is the easiest method for beginners and people who don’t like terminals. When you switch to Linux for the first time, it is hard to use a terminal for everything. Windows users usually don’t use CMD or Powershell. Installing and uninstalling a program is completely GUI.
Linux on the other hand, most of the installations are executed in the terminal. But you can also use GUI to do the same thing. But the terminal is better and faster.
You can remove PPAs in Ubuntu using GUI by following the steps below.
Click on the “Show Application” on the desktop or press the Super-Key (Windows-key). Type “Software” in the search box and look for “Software & Updates“.
Open “Software & Update” from the search result. Click on the “Other Software” tab. Here you will see all the PPA entries. Select the PPA you want to delete and click the “Remove” button the delete the PPA. This will ask you for root permission.
This method is easy to use but time-consuming. Check out the following method to do the same thing in the terminal more efficiently.
Remove PPAs Using APT In The Terminal
Removing PPAs in Ubuntu is as easy as adding one. When you add a PPA in Ubuntu, you use the “add-apt-repository” command in the terminal. You can use the same command to remove the PPA with the “–remove” option.
When you use this command you need to use the exact PPA. Use this command in the following manner.
sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:<ppa_name>
Replace the “<ppa_name>” with the correct PPA name.
Remove PPAs From The Source list In The Terminal
Source List is the location of all the saved PPAs. You can also remove PPAs in Ubuntu by deleting the PPA files from the located directory. You cannot delete these files normally as it requires root permission. So the terminal is the easiest way to do this.
This is not a recommended method but gets the job done. Now follow the steps below.
Use this command to see all the PPAs added to your system.
ls /etc/apt/sources.list.d
PPAs are stored as “.list” files in that directory. Removing these files will remove the PPAs from the system. Use the following command to remove PPAs in Ubuntu.
sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/<ppa_name>.list
Replace the “<ppa_name>” with the exact “.list” filename. This will remove the PPA from the source list.
Disable PPAs By Using PPA-Purge
If you want to disable PPAs in Ubuntu and the related applications, this “ppa-purge” script comes in handy. It’s a bash shell script capable of automatically downgrading all packages
in a given PPA back to the Ubuntu versions.
You can install ppa-purge by using the following command.
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
Now you can use it in the following manner to purge the PPA.
sudo ppa-purge ppa:<ppa_name>
Replace the “<ppa_name>” with the correct PPA name. This is the same name that was used in the “add-apt-repository” command.
This method will not delete a PPA from the source list. Instead, it will disable the PPA and downgrade the associate software.
Conclusion
This is a quick guide to removing PPAs in Ubuntu. I hope you found it useful. If you have any questions or you are facing any problems with removing PPAs in Ubuntu, you can comment below. I will be happy to guide you. And if you have found this post useful, please share this to help others. Have a great day!
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