Does Ruby have a string.startswith("abc") built in method?

It's called String#start_with?, not String#startswith: In Ruby, the names of boolean-ish methods end with ? and the words in method names are separated with an _. Not sure where the s went, personally, I'd prefer String#starts_with? over the actual String#start_with?

Your question title and your question body are different. Ruby does not have a starts_with? method. Rails, which is a Ruby framework, however, does, as sepp2k states. See his comment on his answer for the link to the documentation for it.

You could always use a regular expression though:

if SomeString.match(/^abc/) 
   # SomeString starts with abc

^ means "start of string" in regular expressions

If this is for a non-Rails project, I'd use String#index:

"foobar".index("foo") == 0  # => true