Ubuntu 14.04 Purging ElasticSeach

I installed elasticsearch 6.6.1 on Ubuntu 14.04 but ran into some difficulties. I wish to completely uninstall elasticsearch and install an older version. When I ran

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove elasticsearch

An error message popped out:

Removing elasticsearch (6.6.1) ...
Stopping elasticsearch service...Failed to issue method call: Unit elasticsearch.service not loaded.
dpkg: error processing package elasticsearch (--remove): subprocess installed pre-removal script returned error exit status 5
Failed to issue method call: Unit systemd-sysctl.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status systemd-sysctl.service' for details.
### NOT starting on installation, please execute the following statements to configure elasticsearch service to start automatically using systemd sudo systemctl daemon-reload sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch.service
### You can start elasticsearch service by executing sudo systemctl start elasticsearch.service
chown: cannot access ‘/var/lib/elasticsearch’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error while cleaning up: subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing: elasticsearch

I am not sure about the elasticseach.service as I don't think I have that file. I also already used

sudo rm -rf /var/lib/elasticsearch/
sudo rm -rf /etc/elasticsearch

I tried to reinstall elasticsearch and then use the uninstall but using the apt-get install elasticsearch yielded a similar error:

Setting up elasticsearch (6.6.1) ...
Failed to issue method call: Unit systemd-sysctl.service failed to load: No such file or directory. See system logs and 'systemctl status systemd-sysctl.service' for details.
chown: cannot access ‘/var/lib/elasticsearch’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package elasticsearch (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing: elasticsearch
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Before I realized I should probably use apt-get to remove elasticsearch, I am not sure if I screw up there. Any help is appreciated!

1 Answer

I followed the error messages down a rabbit hole but eventually I used

ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/info | grep -I elasticsearch

and then removing those files. This solved the dpkg error 1 that kept appearing. After using sudo apt-get update elasticsearch no longer seems to be on the server.

This was the last solution posted from here and you can try the other solutions first if you get a similar error of uninstalling.