How to disable reviews or other modules in Magento 2?

by Cristian Balan | Nov 15, 2017 | Linux, Magento

I was looking at a way to disable the Reviews in Magento (using 2.2) but I was disappointed to learn that there is no such backend option…

If you know a little bit more on Magento 2, you may think that disabling a related module from CLI would do the trick.

bin/magento module:disable Magento_Review

But, it turns out that some other modules depend on it so you can’t do it this way:

However, there is a “trick” which I’ve learned from https://magento.stackexchange.com/a/95368.
We have to edit the app/etc/config.php, search for the line corresponding to our module and change its value from 1 to 0:

'Magento_Review' => 0,

After that, from your Magento root folder run

bin/magento setup:upgrade

The result of this command would not tell you clearly if the module was disabled but you can check it using

bin/magento module:status

The expected result should be this:

List of disabled modules:
Magento_Review

Done! Check your website!

Certainly, this is better than editing the template code which is far too much. Hopefully, the guys from Varien would one day allow disabling simple features like this one from the backend.