Honest Analytics documentation

Uninstalling

Deactivating keeps everything

Deactivating unschedules the cron events and stops collection. Tables, settings, capabilities and history are untouched. Reactivating resumes exactly where it stopped.

Somebody switching a plugin off for ten minutes has not asked to lose two years of history.

Deleting keeps everything too, by default

keepDataOnUninstall is on out of the box. Deleting the plugin removes the plugin; the analytics tables stay where they are, and a later install picks them straight back up.

That is deliberate. The rollups cannot be rebuilt from anything else - there is no raw hit data to replay - so destroying them has to be a decision somebody takes, not the one they get for not reading a checkbox.

The Privacy screen states which way the setting currently stands, rather than warning about something that may not apply.

Turning that off

Settings → Advanced → Keep data on uninstall, unticked. Deleting the plugin then runs uninstall.php, which:

  1. Drops all twenty-six {$wpdb->prefix}honest_* tables.
  2. Deletes honest_analytics_settings, honest_analytics_db_version, honest_analytics_licence, honest_analytics_last_drain and honest_analytics_last_gc.
  3. Clears the scheduled events.
  4. Removes the three capabilities from every role.
  5. Deletes the spool directory from uploads.
  6. Deletes the per-user dashboard widget preferences.

On multisite this runs for every site, and the network licence option is removed once.

This cannot be undone. Export first.

Moving hosts, or reinstalling later

Leave the setting alone and the tables travel with the database. Or take them explicitly:

wp db export analytics-backup.sql --tables="$(wp db tables 'wp_honest_*' --format=csv)"

Or export the reports themselves:

wp honest-analytics privacy posture > analytics-posture.txt
wp honest-analytics report pages --range=12mo --limit=1000 --format=csv > pages.csv

Verifying an uninstall

wp db query "SHOW TABLES LIKE '%honest%'"
wp db query "SELECT option_name FROM wp_options WHERE option_name LIKE 'honest_analytics%'"
wp cron event list --fields=hook | grep honest
ls wp-content/uploads/honest-analytics 2>/dev/null

With Keep data on uninstall off, all four should be empty. With it on - the default - the first should still list twenty-six tables, and that is the point.

Testing uninstall in development

Do not run wp plugin uninstall against a checkout. It deletes the plugin directory, and in a development harness that directory is usually a mount of your source tree. This is not hypothetical - it is why dev/setup.sh mounts the repository read-only and why dev/uninstall-test.sh exists:

cd dev && ./uninstall-test.sh

It defines WP_UNINSTALL_PLUGIN, includes uninstall.php through wp eval, and reports what survived. No files are touched.