Here you can get the latest Ruby distributions in your favorite flavor. The current stable version is 1.8.6. Please be sure to read Ruby's License.

Ruby Source Code

Installing from source is a good solution for when you are comfortable enough with your platform and perhaps need specific settings for your environment. It's also a good solution in the event that there are no other premade packages for your platform.

  • Ruby 1.8.6-p110 (md5: 5d9f903eae163cda2374ef8fdba5c0a5) Stable Version (recommended)
  • Stable Snapshot This is tar'd and gzip'd files of the latest stable SVN. It should be better than the last release.
  • Nightly Snapshot This is tar'd and gzip'd files of the latest SVN. It may have unresolved problems.

For information about the Ruby Subversion repository, see Ruby Core.

Ruby on Windows

The Windows platform has several options for installing Ruby. The first option is to use the compiled binary. The second option is to use the One-Click Installer. If you're unsure about how to install Ruby, the One-Click Installer may be the best option for you. (In addition to Ruby, the One-Click Installer also bundles some additional libraries.)

Ruby on Linux

Depending on the distribution you use, there are a number of ways to install Ruby. The first option is simply to download the source code above and compile by hand. However, on some platforms, there are package manager solutions that make installing Ruby extremely easy.

For example, on Debian or Ubuntu apt-get can provide an easy and elegant solution:

% apt-get install ruby1.8 irb1.8 rdoc1.8

Ruby on macOS

There are several options for installing Ruby on Macintosh OS X. Locomotive is a nice choice if you want something that will get you going quickly for Rails development. Using DarwinPorts or Fink will probably suit the more technical-minded users better.

On DarwinPorts, you can install Ruby with:

% port install ruby

Because OS X is based on Unix, downloading and installing from the source is just as easy and effective as the other solutions. To help you with installation of new Ruby (and Rails) versions on OS X, Dan Benjamin's excellent article Building Ruby, Rails, Lighttpd, and MySQL on Tiger will get you up and running quickly.

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