Permanently removing apache2

Question

It seems a simple apt-get remove apache2 does not completely remove apache2 as I can still see it on one of the processes when running top. How does one remove apache2 completely on his ubuntu server?

It's not removed indeed:

~# which apache2
/usr/sbin/apache2
~# whereis apache2
apache2: /usr/sbin/apache2 /etc/apache2 /usr/lib/apache2 /usr/share/apache2 /usr/share/man/man8/apache2.8.gz

But when I do apt-get remove apache2 again:

# apt-get remove apache2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Package apache2 is not installed, so not removed
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Answer 1

apache2 is a metapackage that just selects other packages. If you installed apache by installing that package, you just need to run this to clean up the automatically selected packages:

sudo apt-get autoremove

If that doesn't work, you might have installed one of the dependents manually. You can target all the apache2- packages from space and nuke the lot:

sudo apt-get remove apache2*

For future reference, to find out which package a binary is from, you can run this:

dpkg -S `which apache2`

I'd expect that to come back with apache2.2-bin

Answer 2

First check if you are using right package name, IMO correct package name is : apache2.x-common

If you want to completely remove the package including config files then try:

    dpkg --purge apache2.2-common