Overview

This article will assist in removing or uninstalling DNN from your environment.

Prerequisites

• Access to the SQL Server
• Access to the DNN File Directory

Solution

Note: Please make sure you absolutely want to remove DNN from your installation. You will need to create backups to ensure you have an option to rollback the deletion.

To remove DNN from your installation, it can be split into three main steps:

1. Remove the database in SQL Server.
   1. Log into SQL Server as the admin.
   2. Find the database for the site. (You can find this by checking the Initial Catalog attribute in the <connectionstrings> tag in your web.config file)
   3. Right-click and click delete to delete the database.

      

2. Delete the DNN files in the root folder.
   1. Go to the DNN root folder that houses your DNN files.
   2. Right-click and delete the folder.
      
      • If you cannot delete the folder due to a write.lock file, you must recycle the IIS application pool by right-clicking on the IIS website and clicking Recycle to release the file lock.
3. Delete the IIS website.
   1. Go to IIS on the server with the DNN root folder.
   2. Expand the Connections > Sites > Right Click on the IIS website associated with the DNN environment.
   3. Delete the IIS website.

Testing

To verify that DNN has completely been removed from your environment, check all the three main steps in the solution section of this article and try to find any reference of your DNN website using the naming convention you used to name the DNN website/files.