CMake support "make uninstall"?

Question

I am trying to find some sudo-free solution to enable my users install and unistall my application. Using

set(CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX "$ENV{HOME}/opt/${CPACK_PACKAGE_NAME}-${CPACK_PACKAGE_VERSION}/")
SET(CMAKE_INSTALL_RPATH "$ENV{HOME}/${CPACK_PACKAGE_NAME}-${CPACK_PACKAGE_VERSION}/")

I can direct the files to the user's home directory, and

make install

works fine. With reference to What's the opposite of 'make install', ie. how do you uninstall a library in Linux? I did not find any idea, which is sudo-free and is not complex for a non-system-admin person.

1. Is anyhow make uninstall supported by CMake?

2. My uninstall is quite simple: all files go in a subdirectory of the user's home. In principle, removed that new subdirectory could solve the problem. Has make install, with parameters above, any side effect, or I can write in my user's guide that the newly produced subdirectory can be removed as 'uninstall'?

Answer 1

One solution is to use packaging with CPack. In Linux, that will create a package that can be installed/uninstalled by your package manager. In Windows with the NSIS generator, you'll get an installer which also deploys uninstall.exe to your program files.

Here's a basic example of creating a debian package:

$ touch file
$ cat CMakeLists.txt
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)

install(FILES file DESTINATION etc)

set(CPACK_PACKAGE_NAME foo)
set(CPACK_PACKAGE_CONTACT "me <[email protected]>")
set(CPACK_GENERATOR DEB)
include(CPack)
$ cmake .
$ cpack

Then instead of make install DESTDIR=/usr/local use sudo dpkg -i foo-0.1.1-Linux.deb.

To uninstall use sudo dpkg -P foo or sudo apt purge foo.

The advantage of using a package manager over make install are numerous. Here are a few:

• If you lose the source code, you can still uninstall the software.
• If you dpkg -S /etc/foo, it will tell you which package "owns" this file.
• If you want to install a new version of the software, you won't need to manually uninstall the previous version. It's all automatic.
• You can publish the package so others can install it.
• If your package deploys a file that is also owned by another package, it will fail to install. That's good because it prevents you from accidentally destroying other packages.
• You have the ability to add scripts to the installation. Instead of simply copying files, you can add system users, enable serves, or perform compatibility operations on old databases during upgrade.

Answer 2

No there is not. See in the FAQ from CMake wiki:

By default, CMake does not provide the "make uninstall" target, so you cannot do this. We do not want "make uninstall" to remove useful files from the system.

If you want an "uninstall" target in your project, then nobody prevents you from providing one. You need to delete the files listed in install_manifest.txt file. [followed by some example code]

Answer 3

From the source folder:

1. open install_manifest.txt (created by make install)

2. remove all the directories/files listed

3. remove any remaining files you missed:

   xargs rm < install_manifest.txt

4. remove any hidden directories/files:

   $rm -rf ~/.packagename

Remove the source folder.

Answer 4

# make uninstall
add_custom_target("uninstall" COMMENT "Uninstall installed files")
add_custom_command(
    TARGET "uninstall"
    POST_BUILD
    COMMENT "Uninstall files with install_manifest.txt"
    COMMAND xargs rm -vf < install_manifest.txt || echo Nothing in
            install_manifest.txt to be uninstalled!
)

Add this to CMakeLists.txt, then an uninstall target is made by hand.

Answer 5

Remove files and folders (empty only) added by make install from a cmake project:

cat install_manifest.txt | sudo xargs rm
cat install_manifest.txt | xargs -L1 dirname | sudo xargs rmdir -p

The second command will print a bunch of errors because it recursively deletes folders until it finds one that is not empty. I like seeing those errors to know which folders are left. If you want to hide these errors you can add --ignore-fail-on-non-empty to rmdir.

Answer 6

If you want to add an uninstall target you can take a look to the official CMake FAQ at:

https://gitlab.kitware.com/cmake/community/wikis/FAQ#can-i-do-make-uninstall-with-cmake

If you just want a quick way to uninstall all files, just run:

xargs rm < install_manifest.txt

install_manifest.txt file is created when you run make install.