How do you uninstall rbenv on macOS?

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.


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


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

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