Sometimes you install a Joomla extension and your Joomla administrator panel crashes. You would like to immediately uninstall this extension but your Joomla administrator panel is not operable. What should you do?
Your solution in such circumstances is to delete this extension manually.
Let's take a look at this process in more detail. For the purpose of this tutorial, I will be deleting a component. Once you learn how to manually delete a Joomla component, you then will be able to apply the same steps to delete a Joomla module or a Joomla plugin.
Delete the folders and files
The most important step is to remove the files for the extension:
- Open up the file structure of your Joomla site. Use either an FTP client of your choice of the file management tools available in your hosting control panel.
- Go to /administrator/components/ and find your Joomla component. For my demonstration, I am looking for com_osdownloads in /administrator/components/:
- Delete your component.
- Go to /components/ and delete your component.
- Go to /media/ and check if you find your component there. In my example with OSDownloads, I did find /com_osdownloads/ in /media/.
- Go to the /modules/ folder and check if it contains a folder named mod_[your-component-name]. In my case, I found the folder /mod_osdownloadsfiles/.
- Run the same step for the /plugins/ folder.
Paranoid extra step: Delete data in the database
This next step is 100% not essential. However, we've included it just in case you are paranoid enough to take things this far. You can also remove extension data from your database.
- In your hosting account, open the phpMyAdmin database administration tool. Please, consult your hosting support if you need help with locating phpMyAdmin.
- In the left panel, click on the name of the database of your Joomla site. For my demonstration, I will click on "osdownloads":
- You will see all the database tables. Delete all the tables that contain the name of the extension being deleted.
- At the top of the screen, click "Search", as shown in the next image:
- You will see the "Search" tab open. Enter the name of your Joomla extension in the top "Words or values to search for (wildcard: "%")" field, click "Select all", and click "Go":
- You will see the list of all the database tables. The tables containing a reference to, in my example the OSDownloads extension, will have the "Browse" and "Delete" buttons, as you can see in the next image. Click "Delete" for the first table with these buttons:
- You will see the box prompting you to confirm that you would like to delete a record from this table:
- Click "OK". You will see that the "Browse" and "Delete" buttons for this given table disappeared. Excellent! You just deleted traces of the failed installation of your Joomla extension from this table. Repeat this step for the rest of the tables.
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