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Uninstall

Sparehand keeps to your home folder on every machine. This page lists everything it puts on the hub (your Mac), on each worker and in the cloud, and the order to remove it so nothing is left behind.

1. Clean each worker first

While a worker is still listed, one command undoes everything Sparehand put on it, from the hub:

sparehand remove NAME              # or in the app: a machine's menu → Remove and clean up…

It turns file sharing off (the share, its account and firewall rule), stops and removes Ollama (the model server, its launchd agent or systemd service and the program; downloaded models stay in ~/.ollama/models, which you can delete yourself), turns worker mode off and reopens the apps it had closed, deletes ~/.sparehand on the worker (run folders, dependency caches, Studio's ComfyUI, Python and models when they were installed under it, the helper scripts and markers), and, as its last act there, removes the hub's line from the worker's ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Then it forgets the worker on the hub.

What stays on the worker, on purpose, because something else may use it: the SSH server, rsync, git and the tools your projects use; Remote Login on a Mac; on Windows, the task that keeps WSL alive and the firewall rule for SSH (both need an administrator: the command prints the two PowerShell lines to remove them); on a Linux server, the build user Sparehand made (delete it with userdel -r USER). Studio's ComfyUI goes under ~/ai/comfyui instead of ~/.sparehand when the worker has an ~/ai folder (a link to a big drive): delete it there yourself. Playwright's Chromium and the Inter font were installed into the user's own folders by Studio's setup and stay.

A machine that is off can't be cleaned: sparehand remove NAME then only forgets it and says what stayed there, so remove it when it is on. It also leaves everything in place when another worker on this hub is the same machine, or when the machine runs jobs or keeps another hub's run folders: add --clean to clean it all the same. --keep only forgets the machine.

2. Cloud machines

A cloud machine costs money while it exists, even stopped (its disk or volume). Delete it at the provider through Sparehand, which also forgets it:

sparehand cloud remove NAME --delete     # the machine and its disk or volume; or on its card in the app

Then, if you like, revoke the credential at the provider (the API key, access key, service principal or service account) and delete it from the hub's Keychain (sparehand-cloud items, below).

3. The hub (your Mac)

The app does all of this section in one go: Settings → Advanced → Uninstall Sparehand… lists what it found (the hook, the sparehand command, Open at login, the licence key, the Keychain items, the folders, the preferences), offers the workers' clean-up from step 1 first, asks once, removes it all, and quits (optionally moving the app itself to the Trash). The logs in ~/Library/Logs/Sparehand and anything below that it didn't find stay; the rest of this section is the same by hand.

The coding tools' hooks

If you connected any: sparehand agent uninstall all (or Settings → AI Tools, off). It puts every file it changed back exactly as it was (Claude Code's ~/.claude/settings.json, and the files of Gemini CLI, Cursor, Codex and the other tools) and removes the files it added; a file you changed since keeps your changes and loses only Sparehand's part. The copies it kept for that, in ~/.config/sparehand/agent-tools/, go with it.

The app

Turn off Open at login (Settings → General, or System Settings → General → Login Items), Quit Sparehand from its menu, and delete it from Applications. The sparehand command in ~/.local/bin is a link into the app, so it stops working at once; delete the link, and the line Setup may have added to ~/.zprofile (# added by Sparehand, which puts ~/.local/bin on your PATH) if nothing else uses it.

Its folders

rm -rf ~/.config/sparehand ~/.local/state/sparehand ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sparehand ~/Library/Logs/Sparehand ~/Sparehand ~/.ssh/sparehand-cloud
defaults delete dev.sparehand.mac 2>/dev/null     # the app's preferences

The Keychain

Open Keychain Access (or use security delete-generic-password -s NAME in Terminal) and delete the items Sparehand made, each named after what it holds:

Jira and Azure DevOps tokens live in items you named yourself in app.json.

SSH

The key Setup or sparehand ssh-key made (~/.ssh/sparehand_ed25519 and .pub; older versions of Setup made ~/.ssh/id_ed25519, comment sparehand@…) is yours to keep or delete; once every worker is cleaned, nothing trusts it any more. Cloud machines had Host blocks in ~/.ssh/config (removed with the machine); workers' host keys stay in ~/.ssh/known_hosts (ssh-keygen -R ADDRESS removes one). A Host NAME entry you wrote yourself for a worker is yours.

Tailscale

If you published the dashboard: tailscale serve reset, and remove the members you invited in Tailscale's admin console. Tailscale itself is a separate app.

What is left

Nothing of Sparehand's. The outside tools you installed for its features (Tailscale, Claude Code, the Codex and Gemini CLIs, gcloud, az) are yours; their own uninstallers apply. Your accounts at the services you connected (Lemon Squeezy for the licence, the AI and cloud providers, YouTube) are untouched, and so is anything in the cloud you did not delete in step 2.

If you only want to stop using one feature: sparehand ai uninstall NAME removes Ollama from a machine, sparehand files NAME off a shared folder, sparehand forward stop a tunnel, and the keys above can be deleted one at a time (Studio and Crew have a Forget next to each).