Installing Ruby with rbenv on Debian

Quick guide to installing Ruby versions on Debian using rbenv

1. Ensure dependencies are installed using apt-get install gcc make zlib1g zlib1g-dev
2. If you want to use the version of git from Debian and don’t have that installed yet then install that too: apt-get install git
3. Clone rbenv from GitHub: git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
4. Install the ruby-build plugin: git clone git://github.com/sstephenson/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
5. Add ~/.rbenv/bin to your $PATH for access to the rbenv command-line utility: echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.profile
6. Enable shims and command line autocompletion: echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.profile
7. Restart your shell
8. Install ruby: e.g. rbenv install 1.9.3-p392
9. Rebuild the shim executables: rbenv rehash
10. Set the rbenv global version of Ruby to the one just installed: e.g. rbenv global 1.9.3-p392

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After installing, if you get the error no such file to load -- zlib (LoadError) when trying to install any gems this is likely because you are missing zlib1g or zlib1g-dev. You will need to apt get install zlib1g zlib1g-dev and then recompile Ruby again by rerunning rbenv install.