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How to remove Ollama from Mac

Updated 2026-10-01

Before you start

The commands below are provided as-is, without warranty of any kind. Deletion is permanent: rm does not use the Trash, so back up anything you need first. Paths vary by Ollama version and how you installed it. Use at your own risk; Yogi Software Works is not liable for data loss or other damage resulting from these commands. See our Terms.

To remove Ollama from Mac completely, you quit it, delete the app and any command-line binary, then delete the ~/.ollama folder, which is where downloaded models live and is usually the biggest part. This guide lists the locations AiKiller itself checks for Ollama. Each one is listed below, and where the location depends on how you installed Ollama, the guide says so.

Deletion is permanent. rm does not use the Trash, and neither does AiKiller. Models can be downloaded again with ollama pull, but any custom models you created locally (Modelfiles) exist only in ~/.ollama, so back those up first if you need them.

Step 1: Quit Ollama

Quit the Ollama menu bar app, or stop a running server from Terminal:

pkill -x ollama

Step 2: See what is installed

Ollama can be installed as an app or as a command-line binary (for example via Homebrew), so check which of these exist. Paths that do not exist on your Mac can be skipped:

ls -d /Applications/Ollama.app /usr/local/bin/ollama /opt/homebrew/bin/ollama ~/.local/bin/ollama 2>/dev/null

Step 3: Remove the app and binaries

Delete only the items that Step 2 printed. If you installed with Homebrew, brew uninstall ollama is the cleaner way to remove that copy.

rm -rf /Applications/Ollama.app
rm -f /usr/local/bin/ollama /opt/homebrew/bin/ollama ~/.local/bin/ollama

Step 4: Check how much space the models use, then delete them

Downloaded models are stored under ~/.ollama (manifests are in ~/.ollama/models/manifests). Check the size first:

du -sh ~/.ollama

To remove individual models while keeping Ollama, use the official CLI, for example ollama rm <model>; the guide Where Ollama Stores Models on Mac, and How to Delete Them explains how the model folder is organized and why not to delete its files by hand. To see how much space models from other tools take as well, see Free up disk space from AI tools on Mac. To remove everything:

rm -rf ~/.ollama

Step 5: Remove support files, caches and preferences

These are the other locations AiKiller checks. Which of them exist depends on the Ollama version you installed, so some may be missing:

rm -rf "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Ollama"
rm -rf "$HOME/Library/Caches/com.github.ollama"
rm -f "$HOME/Library/Preferences/com.github.ollama.plist"
rm -f "$HOME/Library/Preferences/com.electron.ollama.plist"

What this guide does not cover

We did not verify a launch agent, login item or log file location for Ollama, so none are listed here and we are not claiming they do not exist. If you enabled launch at login, you can turn it off under System Settings → General → Login Items before deleting the app.

Do this in one scan with AiKiller (free)

AiKiller checks all of the Ollama locations above and lists each item with its path and size. Scan Mode is read-only; nothing is deleted until you switch to Clean Mode and type a confirmation code. Like the commands above, deletion is permanent and does not use the Trash.

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