In the past, there was a big challenge to keep a package-based PHP project up to date. We had sort of package managers like PEAR and PECL, but frequently they caused more challenges rather than provided a handy possibility to install and manage packages quickly. Fortunately, the dark age of the mentioned managers is history now, as the Composer comes to fix difficulties. Composer has been improved with every new version, and many modern platforms/frameworks like Symfony, Laravel and Magento use Composer as a part of their systems.

One of the things that Magento first version lacked was an ability to clean up module data from the database upon its removal. This is a common situation when you uninstall an extension but all the related data remains in the database. You can only get rid of it manually. It is inconvenient especially if the module has created a bunch of new tables, custom attributes, system configurations etc. In this case, an automatic removal tool of such data would be very useful.

In Magento 2 there is a great feature, which allows to create an uninstall script for your module. Let’s find out how it works.