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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.

Lucas
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williamcodes
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  • 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

3 Answers3

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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
  • 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

Community
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Red
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    How to remove a line in vim? Use `dd` to delete an entire line. – Red 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
  • 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
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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
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
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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
DawnSong
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