on Red Hat based systems:

$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1

to enable it again:

$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=0
$ sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=0

on Debian based systems:

sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf

Add these lines:

net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1
net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1

restart the system.