How to Remove a PPA via the Command Line

If you’ve used Linux for any amount of time, you’ve probably come across a PPA. A PPA is short for Personal Page Archive. If you’re looking for a specific piece of software not available in the official software store for your distro, you might look into adding a PPA. Most software that is offered via PPA includes the installation instructions to add their PPA and get everything installed. However, not every software includes instructions on how to remove their PPA and uninstall everything. In this tutorial, we’re gonna learn how to remove a PPA via the command line.

Side Thoughts

As far as I’ve heard on forums and StackOverflow and pretty much everywhere else, it’s typically not the best idea to install software using a PPA. I did it a few years ago when I was first getting into linux, but I don’t do it at all anymore. Generally speaking, PPAs aren’t the safest thing to be using and I really don’t have much need for them anymore. In fact, on of the biggest reasons I switched to Manjaro a while back was because of the massive AUR (Arch User Repository). There you can find a massive community of Arch users who have created a ton of software and configured it just for Arch. Still getting the hang of it, but so far it’s been amazing.

Now for the Actual Tutorial

If you happen to know the exact URL of your PPA, you can remove it by using the --remove flag:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:otto-kesselgulasch/gimp

Not that you’d ever remove GIMP! It’s an awesome photo manipulation program and it’s included in official software stores in most distros anyway.

If you don’t know or can’t remember your exact PPA location, you can browse all the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

~$ cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/
~$ ls

Once you find the PPA you wanna trash, just run:

~$ sudo rm nameOfThatPPA.list

also, if you have a .save file paired with it, just trash it as well.

~$ sudo rm nameOfThatPPA.save