Question

After months using Drupal for my websites I noticed module uninstall tab in the modules list.

I’ve always uninstalled my modules by deleting their folders from filesystem (after disabling them). I was wondering if this is the wrong way to remove them.

Thanks

Answer 1

When you uninstall the module, rather then just disabling and removing, you let the module clean up after itself, including:

• Delete tables it created
• Delete system variables it used.

So uninstalling is a good clean, for the health of your database. Things will work fine not doing it, but why keep unused tables in your database?

Note:
It’s up to the module creator to create the code needed to do the clean up, so not all modules do this very well.