How To Install Ruby on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ruby on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Ruby is one of the most popular dynamics and powerful programming languages. It has an elegant syntax, and it is the language behind the Ruby on Rails framework.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Ruby on a Debian 10 (Buster) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Ruby on Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

apt update
apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Ruby on Debian 10.

• Installing Ruby from Debian Repositories

sudo apt install ruby-full

Once the installation is completed, verify the Ruby version:

ruby -v

• Installing Ruby using Rbenv

Rbenv is a lightweight Ruby version management utility that allows you to easily switch Ruby versions. First, install required dependencies for installing rbenv and ruby-build:

sudo apt install git libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev libreadline-dev libncurses5-dev autoconf bison libssl-dev build-essential libyaml-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev libgdbm-dev

Next, navigate to $HOME directory using the below command:

cd
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv

Then, set the path for rbenv and complete the installation by typing the below commands in the terminal one by one:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

Now we install ruby-build plugin for Rbenv run below git command first:

git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
exec $SHELL

Finally, run the below command to install Ruby:

rbenv install 2.7.0

Verify that Ruby was properly installed:

ruby -v

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Ruby. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Ruby on Debian 10 (Buster) system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Ruby website.