How To Install Swift Programming Language on Debian 11

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Swift Programming Language on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Swift, often referred to as “Objective-C, without the C,” is an open-source programming language developed and maintained by Apple. It is very useful for those who want to develop applications for macOS or iOS from Linux. It is an intuitive and friendly programming language for new programmers. It is optimized for development and performance without compromising on either.

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 through the step-by-step installation of the Swift Programming Language on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 11 (Bullseye).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Swift Programming Language on Debian 11 Bullseye

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:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install binutils git gnupg2 libc6-dev libcurl4 libedit2 libgcc-9-dev libpython2.7 libsqlite3-0 libstdc++-9-dev libxml2 libz3-dev pkg-config tzdata zlib1g-dev

Step 2. Installing Python.

Now we download the latest version of the Python 3.9 source archive from its official page:

https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.7/Python-3.9.7.tgz

Next, extract the downloaded file also change it to the extracted directory:

tar xzf Python-3.9.7.tgz
cd Python-3.9.7

Finally, run the configuration command and complete the Python installation:

./configure --enable-optimizations
make altinstall

Check Python installed version:

python3 --version

Step 3. Installing Swift Programming Language on Debian 11.

By default, Swift Programming is not available on Debian 11 base repository. Now we download the latest version of Swift from the official page:

wget https://download.swift.org/swift-5.5.1-release/ubuntu2004/swift-5.5.1-RELEASE/swift-5.5.1-RELEASE-ubuntu20.04.tar.gz

Next, extract the archive file:

tar -xvzf swift-5.5.1-RELEASE-ubuntu20.04.tar.gz

After that, move this newly extracted folder to the opt directory:

sudo mv swift-5.5.1-RELEASE-ubuntu20.04 /opt/swift

You need to download the GPG signature to verify the integrity of the download. To do this, use the following:

wget -q -O - https://swift.org/keys/all-keys.asc | sudo gpg --import -

Now we add the Swift installation path into the PATH environment variable of your system:

echo "export PATH=/opt/swift/usr/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

After that, you can activate the .bashrc file with the following command:

source ~/.bashrc

To verify the installation of Swift, run the following command below:

swift --version

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Swift. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of Swift Programming Language on Debian 11 Bullseye. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Swift website.