Removing Apache from Debian 5

Question

I had Debian 5 installed on my VPS but I found that it came with apache2 already up and running. I tried

apt-get remove apache2

but it said that apache2 wasn't running. I checked top and yep, there it was. So then I turned it off.

/etc/init.d/apache2 stop

which worked fine and shut the daemon down. However, I still can't remove it. I tried aptitude remove but it says that it isn't installed.

What is going on?

Solution

Try apt-get remove apache2-utils.

In Debian 5, Apache is split into multiple packages:

1. apache2
2. apache2-mpm-prefork (or apache2-mpm-worker or apache2-mpm-event)
3. apache2.2-common
4. apache2-utils

There are interdependencies: (1) depends on (2), which depends on (3), which depends on (4). Therefore, removing (4) causes all of them to be removed. (The apache2 package doesn't contain much in itself; it just exists so that you can do apt-get install apache2 to conveniently install all of those packages.)

Comments

[Xeoncross]

Ah, perfect! Cleaned it right up.

[Milad Naseri]

I can verify that this applies to Debian 6, too.