Uninstall the PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 22.04

PostgreSQL is one of the most popular database management systems. It’s a free and open-source software which is renowned for stability, performance, scalability, and security. Many applications and programming languages (Python, JavaScript, Ruby, C/C++, and more) support the PostgreSQL integration. Learn more about PostgreSQL.

In this guide, we will take a quick look at removing the PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 22.04.

Prerequisites:

To perform the steps in this guide, you need the following components:

• A properly-configured Ubuntu system. Learn more about installing Ubuntu 22.04.
• A proper installation of PostgreSQL. Learn more about installing PostgreSQL properly on Ubuntu 22.04.
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• Access to a non-root user with sudo Learn more about managing sudo privilege on Ubuntu.

Step 1: Finding the Installed PostgreSQL Packages

The default method of installing PostgreSQL on Ubuntu is through the APT package manager. The package source can be either the official Ubuntu package repo or the official PostgreSQL APT repo.

First, we check the list of installed packages that contains the term, postgres:

Step 2: Uninstalling PostgreSQL Altogether

Notice that all the packages that are related to PostgreSQL start with the term, postgresql. Using this pattern, we can specify what packages to uninstall to the APT package manager.

Using the following command, we can easily remove all the PostgreSQL packages:

Here,

• The APT package manager uninstalls any installed package that matches the described pattern.
• All the associated dependency packages that are no longer used are also uninstalled at the same time.

Note that it removes all the installed versions of PostgreSQL. If you want to remove a specific version of PostgreSQL, we have to follow a more specific method.

Step 3: Uninstalling a Specific Version

Certain cluster setups may utilize multiple versions of PostgreSQL for compatibility reasons. In such an environment, removing all the PostgreSQL packages may not be suitable. In that case, we can remove a specific version of PostgreSQL.

By checking the list of installed PostgreSQL packages, we can easily determine the versions that are currently installed:

Here,

• We grab the list of installed packages from APT.
• The output is piped to grep and is filtered using the regular expression.

For reference, the release notes page lists all the available versions of PostgreSQL.

Now that we have a target, we can uninstall it using the following command:

Conclusion

We explored the various ways of uninstalling PostgreSQL on Ubuntu. We demonstrated on how to uninstall a specific version as well as uninstall PostgreSQL altogether from the system.

Interested in learning more about PostgreSQL? If you intend to use multiple versions of PostgreSQL on the same machine, you have to assign different ports for each database server. It’s also possible to integrate the PostgreSQL in Java apps using JDBC.