Red Alert: There is no ‘easy way’ to uninstall and completely remove the HDP components installed through ambari. 

I have seen,met and heard of a lot of people who just end up doing a fresh OS install, just because Ambari adds insane number of files to your system, in a variety of places with a lot of ‘symlinks’ that it just turns out to be ridiculously difficult to remove and uninstall HDP components completely.

I believe I was a peculiar victim that got stuck in the vicious cycle of installing and uninstalling HDP components through ambari that I was spending more time in uninstalling these components and installing them again than I was in learning about this amazing open source platform, Hadoop. So, now that I have mastered the art of removing and uninstalling HDP components completely(if not anything else) including all hosts,services and its components, I record it for anyone’s and everyone’s reference.

How to remove and uninstall HDP components completely? 

Here is a step by step tutorial to do just that: The HDP Uninstall!

• 1. Stop all services in ambari 

You can stop all your services in ambari through Web-UI as well as command line:

1. To stop your services from Ambari web based user interface:


Go to Ambari Web UI that runs on port 8080 by default. The URL to access Ambari UI would be structured like this:

HOST_FQDN:8080/

Stop all services in ambari through Web UI
Stop all services in ambari through Web UI

Click on button Actions at the bottom right end and press stop all services. 

2. To stop ambari services from command line interface using Ambari REST API
 You need to stop each of the services one after the other :

curl -u ambari_USERNAME:ambari_PASSWORD -H “X-Requested-By: ambari” -X PUT -d ‘{“RequestInfo”:{“context”:”Stop Service”},”Body”:{“ServiceInfo”:{“state”:”INSTALLED”}}}’ http://AMBARI_SERVER_HOST:8080/api/v1/clusters/CLUSTER_NAME/services/SERVICE_NAME

If you would like to know names of each of those services, This guy here has done pretty amazing work in the post and shared names of each of the services in ambari and explains the deletion of ambari services as well as its host components. 

2. Run this python script to clean up and remove a couple of folders created on your system that comprise the basic part of distribution: 

python /usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages/ambari_agent/HostCleanup.py --silent --skip=users

Note: Use –skip=users argument if you would like the users created for each of the servers/services not to be deleted. From what I have seen, it usually makes no difference and the users really need not be deleted.

3. Remove and clean hadoop packages completely 

Remove all of the Hortonworks HDP components and package by using yum remove command:

For example:

1.  Remove and uninstall hive completely, 
yum remove hive\*

2.  Remove and uninstall oozie completely, 
yum remove oozie\*

3.  Remove and uninstall pig completely, 
yum remove pig\*

4.  Remove and uninstall zookeeper completely, 
yum remove zookeeper\*

5.  Remove and uninstall tez completely, 
yum remove tez\*

6.  Remove and uninstall hbase completely, 
yum remove hbase\*

7. Remove and uninstall ranger completely, 
yum remove ranger\*

8.  Remove and uninstall knox completely, 
yum remove knox\*

9.  Remove and uninstall ranger completely, 
yum remove ranger\*

10.  Remove and uninstall storm completely, 
yum remove storm\*

11.  Remove and uninstall accumulo completely, 
yum remove hadoop\*


12.  Remove and uninstall zookeeper completely, 
yum remove hadoop\*

13. Remove and uninstall ambari-server

ambari-server stop<code>yum erase ambari-server

14. Remove and uninstall ambari-agent

ambari-agent stop<code>yum erase ambari-agent

In case you are using some other distribution of linux, follow this link to find commands to remove these packages on your system. 

4. Remove yum repositories meant for ambari and HDP components 

rm -rf /etc/yum.repos.d/ambari.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/HDP*
yum clean all

5. Clean all folders 

1. Remove all log folders: (You could use rm -rf dir_name command or delete the folders manually)

rm -rf /var/log/ambari-metrics-monitor
rm -rf /var/log/hadoop
rm -rf /var/log/hbase
rm -rf /var/log/hadoop-yarn
rm -rf /var/log/hadoop-mapreduce
rm -rf /var/log/hive
rm -rf /var/log/oozie
rm -rf /var/log/zookeeper
rm -rf /var/log/flume
rm -rf /var/log/hive-hcatalog
rm -rf /var/log/falcon
rm -rf /var/log/knox
rm -rf /var/lib/hive
rm -rf /var/lib/oozie

2. Remove all hadoop directories:
rm -rf /usr/hdp
rm -rf /usr/bin/hadoop
rm -rf  /tmp/hadoop
rm -rf  /var/hadoop
rm -rf  /hadoop/*
rm -rf  /local/opt/hadoop

3. Remove all config directories: 
 rm -rf /etc/hadoop
 rm -rf /etc/hbase
 rm -rf /etc/oozie
 rm -rf /etc/phoenix
 rm -rf /etc/hive
 rm -rf /etc/zookeeper
 rm -rf /etc/flume
 rm -rf /etc/hive-hcatalog
 rm -rf /etc/tez
 rm -rf /etc/falcon
 rm -rf /etc/knox
 rm -rf /etc/hive-webhcat
 rm -rf /etc/mahout
 rm -rf /etc/pig
 rm -rf /etc/hadoop-httpfs

4. Remove all process Id’s 
 rm -rf /var/run/hadoop
 rm -rf /var/run/hbase
 rm -rf /var/run/hadoop-yarn
 rm -rf /var/run/hadoop-mapreduce
 rm -rf /var/run/hive
 rm -rf /var/run/oozie
 rm -rf /var/run/zookeeper
 rm -rf /var/run/flume
 rm -rf /var/run/hive-hcatalog
 rm -rf /var/run/falcon
 rm -rf /var/run/webhcat
 rm -rf /var/run/knox 

5. Remove all zookeeper db files 
 rm -rf /local/home/zookeeper/* 

 6. Remove all library folders 
rm -rf /usr/lib/flume
rm -rf  /usr/lib/storm
rm -rf /var/lib/hadoop-hdfs
rm -rf  /var/lib/hadoop-yarn
rm -rf  /var/lib/hadoop-mapreduce
rm -rf  /var/lib/flume
rm -rf  /var/lib/knox

7. Remove oozie-temp folder 
 rm -rf /var/tmp/oozie


6. Remove database 

Depending on what database you used for ambari, hive and oozie, just go and drop the databases created for each of these. 

That;s a good deal of data clean up, isn’t it?

But hold on, when you will start to reinstall all these components from ambari, the components are still bound to fail and it’s pretty much guaranteed. 

Ask me, why?

I mentioned a little something about symlinks in the very beginning of this post. That’s where all of the problem lies. Symlinks on linux systems are links to other files and directories. 

Now, what really happens is that we essentially deleted all the files and folders but never removed these symlinks. Now when ambari installs these components, it checks originally for the source of these symlinks and since it resides, it skips the installations of some of the required components and thus starts the whole game of bizarre problems when you thought the installations were complete and actually try to start the services in Ambari. That’s pretty much the sad story with services and components installed through ambari.

Now, how to fix this part ?

Solution:  Ambari services and components are never completely uninstalled until we remove these symlinks originally. 

1. Go to directory /etc/conf 
 2. Delete each of the HDP directories and components. 

and you are done! You can now reinstall the ambari and all its components without having to do a fresh OS install ;) . I hope that helps. 

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userdel oozie
userdel hive
userdel zeppelin
userdel ambari-qa
userdel flume
userdel hdfs
userdel knox
userdel storm
userdel spark
userdel mapred
userdel accumulo
userdel hbase
userdel tez
userdel zookeeper
userdel kafka
userdel falcon
userdel sqoop
userdel yarn
userdel hcat


groupdel spark
groupdel hadoop
groupdel knox
groupdel hdfs
groupdel zookeeper
groupdel accumulo
groupdel yarn
groupdel mapred
groupdel falcon
groupdel flume
groupdel hbase
groupdel hive
groupdel oozie
groupdel sqoop
groupdel storm
groupdel slider
groupdel livy
groupdel kafka
groupdel ranger
groupdel operator
groupdel opt1
groupdel kms
groupdel zeppelin

## remove home directories
cd /home 
 rm -rf flume
 rm -rf hbase
 rm -rf hdfs
 rm -rf hduser
 rm -rf ambari-qa
 rm -rf accumulo
 rm -rf atlas
 rm -rf falcon
 rm -rf hcat
 rm -rf hive
 rm -rf infra-solr/
 rm -rf kafka
 rm -rf kms
 rm -rf knox
 rm -rf livy
 rm -rf mahout
 rm -rf mapred
 rm -rf oozie
 rm -rf opt1
 rm -rf ranger
 rm -rf solr
 rm -rf spark
 rm -rf sqoop
 rm -rf storm
 rm -rf tez
 rm -rf yarn
 rm -rf zeppelin   
 rm -rf zookeeper