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.

Plummet

The official Rbenv documentation contains a section on uninstalling rbenv. – Educate

Answer 1

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

Indene

How to remove a line in vim? Use dd to delete an entire line. – Indene

This tip solved my problem involving Heroku on High Sierra! I can't thank you enough. – Pyle

use nano instead of vim, for novice users like me – Particular

I did this and now /usr/bin/ruby is unresponsive – Centurial

What about /opt/rbenv? Does that belong to the OS, or did brew put that stuff there? – Leucite

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! – Bobbysoxer

On newer macOS versions with zsh being the default shell, you may want to delete the rbenv-related lines from ~/.zshrc. – Saline

Answer 2

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

Hemolysis

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. – Spheroidal

Answer 3

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

Cassiani