How to Uninstall Hermes Agent

Before You Uninstall

Before removing Hermes Agent, consider whether a full uninstall is actually what you need:

• Agent not responding? — See the deployment troubleshooting guide before giving up.
• Running an old version? — An upgrade often fixes issues without losing your data. See the Hermes Agent update guide.
• Want to start fresh? — You can reset your config and memory without a full uninstall by removing just the data directory (see Remove Config and Data below) and restarting.
• Skills or memory acting up? — Deleting the data directory wipes all stored memory and credentials. Only do this if you intend a clean slate.

Uninstall a Docker Installation

If you ran Hermes Agent via Docker, the uninstall is three steps: stop and remove the container, remove the image, and delete the bind-mounted data directory.

# 1. Stop and remove the container
#    Replace "hermes" with your container name if different
docker stop hermes && docker rm hermes

# 2. Remove the Docker image
#    List images first to find the exact tag you used
docker images | grep hermes

docker rmi ghcr.io/nousresearch/hermes-agent:latest

# 3. Remove the bind-mounted data directory
#    Adjust the path to wherever you mounted it
rm -rf ~/hermes-data

If you used Docker Compose, you can tear everything down in one command from the directory containing your compose.yml:

docker compose down --rmi all --volumes

The --volumes flag removes named volumes. If you used a bind mount instead, delete that directory manually as shown above.

Uninstall a Source Installation

Hermes Agent installed from source lives in a cloned Git repository and a Python virtual environment (commonly managed with uv). Neither is registered system-wide, so removal is simply deleting the directories.

# 1. Stop the running agent process first (if active)
#    Find it and kill it, or Ctrl+C in the terminal running it

# 2. Remove the cloned repository directory
#    Replace ~/hermes-agent with the path where you cloned it
rm -rf ~/hermes-agent

# 3. If the virtual environment lives outside the repo, remove it too
#    (by default uv creates .venv inside the repo, so step 2 covers it)
rm -rf ~/.venv/hermes   # only if you created a named venv elsewhere

On Linux, Hermes Agent may run as a systemd service. If you set that up, disable and remove the unit before deleting the files:

sudo systemctl stop hermes-agent
sudo systemctl disable hermes-agent
sudo rm /etc/systemd/system/hermes-agent.service
sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Remove Config and Data

Hermes Agent stores its memory, credentials, and configuration in a data directory. Removing it wipes the agent's memory and any connected platform credentials (Telegram tokens, Discord tokens, etc.).

Mac and Linux

rm -rf ~/.hermes

Windows (PowerShell)

Remove-Item -Recurse -Force "$env:USERPROFILE\.hermes"

If you mounted a custom data directory (via -v /some/path:/opt/data in Docker or a DATA_DIR env var in a source install), remove that path instead of ~/.hermes.

Verify Removal

Confirm Hermes Agent is fully gone:

# Docker: confirm no hermes containers are running
docker ps | grep hermes
# Should return nothing

# Docker: confirm the image is removed
docker images | grep hermes
# Should return nothing

# Source: confirm the repo directory is gone
ls ~/hermes-agent
# Should return: No such file or directory

# Data directory: confirm it is gone
ls ~/.hermes
# Should return: No such file or directory

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