How does one remove a tar-installed Node.js from CentOS 7?

Question

A CentOS 7 server has v0.12.7 of Node.js installed, and the installation was done using a tar. This is leading to conflicts when I try to install a more modern version of Node.js using yum. What specific steps need to be taken (i.e. what specific commands need to be typed) to safely remove the tar-installed v.0.12.7?

The tar for v0.12.7 can be found at this link..

Also, in case it matters, the installed tar files on the server are as follows:

[root@localhost ~]# cd /
[root@localhost /]# find . -type f -iname "*.tar"
find: ‘./run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied
./opt/node-v0.12.7/deps/npm/node_modules/tar/test/dir-normalization.tar
./opt/node-v0.12.7/deps/npm/test/fixtures/gitignore-and-npmignore-2.tar
./opt/node-v0.12.7/deps/npm/test/fixtures/gitignore-and-npmignore.tar
./usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/test/fixtures/gitignore-and-npmignore-2.tar
./usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/test/fixtures/gitignore-and-npmignore.tar
./usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/tar/test/dir-normalization.tar
[root@localhost /]# 

The conflict between the two versions can be seen from the following commands:

[root@localhost /]# node --version
v0.12.7
[root@localhost /]# which node
/usr/local/bin/node
[root@localhost /]# /usr/bin/node -v
v5.6.0
[root@localhost /]#   

So how do I safely remove the tar-installed v0.12.7? What specific commands need to be typed?

---

TRYING @Gilles's APPROACH:

---

Per the suggestions in @Gille's answer, I tried the following:

[root@localhost local]# cd /usr/local/bin
[root@localhost bin]# ls
bower  express  grunt  gulp  node  nodemon  npm  yo
[root@localhost bin]# 

I therefore tried the following commands, which seem to have deleted v0.12.7, but I am waiting before marking the answer below as accepted because there is a downstream error that is documented in this other posting. Any help on the downstream error is much appreciated. Here is the code that seems to have worked here:

rm /usr/local/bin/node
rm /usr/local/bin/npm
\rm -R /opt/node-v0.12.7/

Answer 1

It's impossible to give you specific commands to perform the uninstallation because you don't give us the specific commands that were used to perform the installation. However, based on the information you give, this isn't a difficult task. I recommend that you stop your ongoing efforts — you seem to be doing some very complicated and useless things.

The manually-installed version has the binary in /usr/local/bin. That's good: it means that whoever installed it didn't make a complete mess. Just as a reminder: /bin, /lib, /bin and /usr outside /usr/local belong to the package manager; /usr/local belongs to the system administrator. You have manually-installed software under /usr/local; that's fine.

The binary package of node.js puts files under a common tree, containing:

• Some documentation files in the toplevel directory.
• bin/node and bin/npm
• share/man/man1/node.1
• lib/node_modules
• share/systemtap/tapset/node.stp
• include/node

Since node is in /usr/local/bin, look for the other files and directories under /usr/local as well, e.g. /usr/local/share/man/man1/node.1, etc. If you find them, remove them. If you don't find them, they may have been installed elsewhere, or not at all; you may try locate to find where they are (if they're present: the header files under include and the systemtap file aren't useful to everyone).

It looks like /opt/node-v0.12.7 is the source tree. You can remove that.

If you're worried about removing a file that turns out to be necessary, make sure your backups are up-to-date — or just move the files out of the way or keep a tarball of them while you test that your system still works.

If you're really worried and in a hurry, chances are that the manually-installed version doesn't conflict with the rpm version — there's only that node binary (and probably npm as well) that's ahead of the version in /usr/bin in the PATH. Rename /usr/local/bin/node to /usr/local/bin/node-0.12.7 (and likewise for npm) and node or #!/usr/bin/env node will invoke the system-installed version.