What is Ruby?

Ruby is an interpreted object-oriented programming language often used for web development. It also offers many scripting features to process plain text and serialized files, or manage system tasks. It is simple, straightforward, and extensible.

Features of Ruby

• Simple Syntax
• Normal Object-oriented Features (e.g. class, method calls)
• Advanced Object-oriented Features (e.g. mix-in, singleton-method)
• Operator Overloading
• Exception Handling
• Iterators and Closures
• Garbage Collection
• Dynamic Loading of Object Files (on some architectures)
• Highly Portable (works on many Unix-like/POSIX compatible platforms as well as Windows, macOS, etc.) cf. https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/master/doc/maintainers.rdoc#label-Platform+Maintainers

How to get Ruby

For a complete list of ways to install Ruby, including using third-party tools like rvm, see:

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/

Git

The mirror of the Ruby source tree can be checked out with the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/ruby/ruby.git

There are some other branches under development. Try the following command to see the list of branches:

$ git ls-remote https://github.com/ruby/ruby.git

You may also want to use https://git.ruby-lang.org/ruby.git (actual master of Ruby source) if you are a committer.

Subversion

Stable branches for older Ruby versions can be checked out with also the following command:

$ svn co https://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/branches/ruby_2_6/ ruby

Try the following command to see the list of branches:

$ svn ls https://svn.ruby-lang.org/repos/ruby/branches/

Ruby home page

https://www.ruby-lang.org/

Documentation

• English
• Japanese

Mailing list

There is a mailing list to discuss Ruby. To subscribe to this list, please send the following phrase:

subscribe

in the mail body (not subject) to the address ruby-talk-request@ruby-lang.org.

Copying

See the file COPYING.

Feedback

Questions about the Ruby language can be asked on the Ruby-Talk mailing list or on websites like https://stackoverflow.com.

Bugs should be reported at https://bugs.ruby-lang.org. Read "Reporting Issues" for more information.

Contributing

See "Contributing to Ruby", which includes setup and build instructions.

The Author

Ruby was originally designed and developed by Yukihiro Matsumoto (Matz) in 1995.

matz@ruby-lang.org