How do you uninstall rbenv on macOS?

Question

How do you uninstall rbenv on macOS? My version of rbenv is messed up, and brew uninstall rbenv isn't working because brew relies on ruby.

The official Rbenv documentation contains a section on [uninstalling rbenv](https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv#uninstalling-rbenv). — software_writer, Feb 01 '22 at 17:44

score 158 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 11 '22 at 16:55

158

I took these steps to successfully get rid of rbenv on my mac running El Capitan (10.11.4). Rbenv is a major cause of Failed to build gem native extension errors from my experience.

Remove using brew: brew remove rbenv
Delete .rbenv directory: rm -rf ~/.rbenv

For Bash

Open .bash_profile file and delete any lines with rbenv in them: vi ~/.bash_profile
Open .bashrc file and delete any lines with rbenv in them: vi ~/.bashrc

Finally, reload .bash_profile and .bashrc:

. ~/.bash_profile && . ~/.bashrc

For ZShell

Open .zprofile file and delete any lines with rbenv in them
Open .zshrc file and delete any lines with rbenv in them

Finally, reload .zprofile and .zshrc:

. ~/.zprofile && . ~/.zshrc

edited Nov 11 '22 at 16:55

Jason FB

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answered Apr 25 '16 at 12:44

pyfork

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How to remove a line in vim? Use `dd` to delete an entire line. – pyfork Jun 08 '16 at 07:19
This tip solved my problem involving Heroku on High Sierra! I can't thank you enough. – YCode Aug 13 '18 at 01:14
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use nano instead of vim, for novice users like me – Pulkit Mar 28 '19 at 21:55
I did this and now `/usr/bin/ruby` is unresponsive – William Entriken Apr 13 '20 at 14:30
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What about /opt/rbenv? Does that belong to the OS, or did brew put that stuff there? – Rob F Apr 29 '20 at 20:21
I was running into CA certs problem with rbenv managed ruby version 2.3.1, and tried to update to 2.7.2 but kept failing. I switch my ruby version with homebrew, and the CA certs problem went away. Thanks! – Stella Dec 05 '20 at 20:59
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On newer macOS versions with `zsh` being the default shell, you may want to delete the `rbenv`-related lines from `~/.zshrc`. – ohaleck Aug 05 '21 at 10:45

score 16 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 02 '15 at 00:57

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I think you should be able to uninstall rbenv by simply removing ~/.rbenv.

rm -rf ~/.rbenv

Or, if you installed rbenv via Homebrew, you can do

rm -rf `brew --prefix`/Cellar/rbenv

answered Jul 02 '15 at 00:57

NigoroJr

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What about ``rm -rf `brew --prefix`/Cellar/ruby`` and ``rm -rf `brew --prefix`/Cellar/ruby-build``? I’m pretty sure I only installed ruby-build because rbenv prompted me to. – Lucas Mar 04 '20 at 23:14

score 7 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 14 '20 at 13:59

7

Remember to uninstall all ruby versions installed by rbenv before uninstalling rbenv itself.

rbenv versions
rbenv uninstall x.y.z # uninstall all versions from the last step
brew uninstall rbenv

answered Sep 14 '20 at 13:59

DawnSong

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How do you uninstall rbenv on macOS?

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