---
title: "Removing Craft CMS plugins that you can't uninstall"
date: 2018-07-20T11:43:00-04:00
author: John Morton
canonical_url: "https://supergeekery.com/blog/removing-craft-cms-plugins-that-you-cant-uninstall"
section: Blog
---
# Removing Craft CMS plugins that you can't uninstall

*July 20, 2018* by John Morton

![Removing Plugins You Cant Uninstall](https://static.supergeekery.com/site-assets/removing-plugins-you-cant-uninstall.png)

I was recently updating my site and decided to use Michael Rog's [Wordsmith](https://wordsmith.docs.topshelfcraft.com/) plugin for some text manipulation. His Wordsmith plugin included some features that I liked that my own custom plugin, a simple port of [Hacksaw](https://github.com/ryanshrum/hacksaw), didn't include. I had created this plugin when Craft 3 was early in development, a time when there were many fewer plugins available and no plugin store at all. 

Installing plugins through Craft 3's Plugin Store makes things _very easy_. Uninstalling plugins is also very easy. As you can see by the screenshot above, the [Pic Puller plugin](https://github.com/jmx2inc/picpuller-for-craft3) has a convenient uninstall option in the control panel. 

But, my custom "hacksaw" plug-in does not have an uninstall option. At first glance I wondered how to get rid of this custom plugin. It occurred to me I would uninstall it the same way I had installed this custom plug-in. **Composer**. 

### A quick refresher

I've got this custom plugin built on my local machine.  It lives in a directory called `local-plugins/hacksaw` in the base directory for my site, right next to the `config`, `src`, and `web` directories.

In my site's `composer.json` file, I have told composer to look in this directory when installing plugins via the command line. In my case, my `composer.json` contains this:

```
"repositories": [
        {
            "type": "path",
            "url": "local-plugins/hacksaw/"
        }
    ]
```

That allowed me to install my local plugin, which is identified in its _own_ composer.json file by the name of "jmx2hacksaw/hacksaw", by using this command:

```
composer require jmx2hacksaw/hacksaw
```

### Uninstalling

Now that I don't need this local plugin anymore, getting rid of it is basically undoing my `require` command:

```
composer remove jmx2hacksaw/hacksaw
```

The local plugin is now removed.

---

**Tags:** craftcms