Uninstall applications manually from Websphere

Sometimes, when you try to uninstall an application from the Websphere admin console, for whatever reason, it would fail with the following message displayed at the top of the admin console,

An error occurred while uninstalling <<your_app>>. Check the logs for more details.

with the following error message in SystemOut.log.

UninstallSche I   ADMA5107E: The application <<your_app>> cannot be uninstalled.

When that happens, you will need to uninstall the application manually, and to do that, first, delete your_app.ear folders from the following two locations.

<Websphere-install-dir>/AppServer/profiles/<<your_profile>>/installedApps/<<your_cell>>

And

<Websphere-install-dir>/AppServer/profiles/<<your_profile>>/config/cells/<<your_cell>>/applications.

Then empty all the contents from the following two folders.

<Websphere-install-dir>/AppServer/profiles/<<your_profile>>/temp
<Websphere-install-dir>/AppServer/profiles/<<your_profile>>/wstemp

Next, go to the following folder and edit serverindex.xml.

<Websphere-install-dir>/AppServer/profiles/<AppSrvxx>/config/cells/<<your_cell>>/nodes/<<your_node>>/serverindex.xml

And delete the lines that has <<your_app.ear>> such as

<deployedApplications><<your_app.ear>>/deployments/<<your_app_war>></deployedApplications>

and/or

<extendedApplicationDataElements xmi:id="ExtendedApplicationData_xxxxxxx" applicationName="<<your_app_war>>" standaloneModuleName="<<your_app.war>>"/>


That's it. Restart the server your will no longer see the application in the server.