setup-ruby

setup-ruby

This action downloads a prebuilt ruby and adds it to the PATH.

It is very efficient and takes about 5 seconds to download, extract and add the given Ruby to the PATH. No extra packages need to be installed.

Important: Prefer ruby/setup-ruby@v1. If you pin to a commit or release, only the Ruby versions available at the time of the commit will be available, and you will need to update it to use newer Ruby versions, see Versioning.

Supported Versions

This action currently supports these versions of MRI, JRuby and TruffleRuby:

Interpreter	Versions
ruby	1.9.3, 2.0.0, 2.1.9, 2.2, all versions from 2.3.0 until 4.1.0-preview1, head, debug, mingw, mswin, ucrt
jruby	9.1.17.0 - 10.1.3.0, head
truffleruby	19.3.0 - 40.0.0, head
truffleruby+graalvm	21.2.0 - 40.0.0, head

ruby-debug is the same as ruby-head but with assertions enabled (-DRUBY_DEBUG=1).

ruby-asan is the same as ruby-head but with AddressSanitizer (ASan) enabled, helpful for finding memory issues in native extensions. Native extensions are automatically compiled with AddressSanitizer when using ruby-asan. asan-release is similar to ruby-asan but built from the latest stable release tag.

ruby-asan and asan-release are currently only available on ubuntu-24.04 and ubuntu-26.04.

Regarding Windows ruby master builds, mingw is a MSYS2/MinGW build, head & ucrt are MSYS2/UCRT64 builds, and mswin is a MSVC/VS 2022 build.

Preview and RC versions of Ruby might be available too on Ubuntu and macOS (not on Windows). However, it is recommended to test against ruby-head rather than previews, as it provides more useful feedback for the Ruby core team and for upcoming changes.

Only release versions published by RubyInstaller are available on Windows. Due to that, Ruby 2.2 resolves to 2.2.6 on Windows and 2.2.10 on other platforms. Ruby 2.3 on Windows only has builds for 2.3.0, 2.3.1 and 2.3.3.

Note that Ruby ≤ 2.4 and the OpenSSL version it needs (1.0.2) are both end-of-life, which means Ruby ≤ 2.4 is unmaintained and considered insecure.

Supported Platforms

The action works on these GitHub-hosted runners images. Runner images not listed below are not supported yet. $OS-latest just alias to one of these images.

Operating System	Supported
Ubuntu	ubuntu-22.04, ubuntu-24.04, ubuntu-26.04, ubuntu-22.04-arm, ubuntu-24.04-arm, ubuntu-26.04-arm
macOS	macos-15 and newer versions
Windows	windows-2022, windows-2025, windows-11-arm

Not all combinations of runner images and versions are supported. The full list of available Ruby versions can be seen in here for Ubuntu and macOS and in windows-versions.json for Windows. Newer runner images only have builds of the latest patch release of each series, so prefer a short version like '3.4' over an exact one like '3.4.2', or pin to a specific runner version (e.g. ubuntu-24.04). For example, ubuntu-26.04 (which ubuntu-latest moves to, see this announcement) only has builds of CRuby 3.2 and newer, as older CRuby versions do not compile on it.

The prebuilt releases are generated by ruby-builder and on Windows by RubyInstaller2. The mingw, ucrt and mswin builds are generated by ruby-loco. ruby-head is generated by ruby-dev-builder, jruby-head is generated by jruby-dev-builder, truffleruby-head and truffleruby+graalvm-head are generated by truffleruby-dev-builder.

Usage

Single Job

name: My workflow
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v6
    - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      with:
        ruby-version: '4.0' # Not needed with a .ruby-version, .tool-versions or mise.toml
        bundler-cache: true # runs 'bundle install' and caches installed gems automatically
    - run: bundle exec rake

Matrix of Ruby Versions

This matrix tests all stable releases and head versions of MRI, JRuby and TruffleRuby on Ubuntu and macOS.

name: My workflow
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        os: [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest]
        # Due to https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/849, we have to use quotes for '3.0'
        ruby: ['3.3', '3.4', '4.0', head, jruby, jruby-head, truffleruby, truffleruby-head]
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v6
    - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      with:
        ruby-version: ${{ matrix.ruby }}
        bundler-cache: true # runs 'bundle install' and caches installed gems automatically
    - run: bundle exec rake

Matrix of Gemfiles

name: My workflow
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        gemfile: [ rails7, rails8 ]
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    env: # $BUNDLE_GEMFILE must be set at the job level, so it is set for all steps
      BUNDLE_GEMFILE: ${{ github.workspace }}/gemfiles/${{ matrix.gemfile }}.gemfile
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v6
      - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
        with:
          ruby-version: '4.0'
          bundler-cache: true # runs 'bundle install' and caches installed gems automatically
      - run: bundle exec rake

See the GitHub Actions documentation for more details about the workflow syntax and the condition and expression syntax.

Supported Version Syntax

• engine-version like ruby-2.6.5 and truffleruby-19.3.0
• short version like '2.6', automatically using the latest release matching that version (2.6.10)
• version only like '2.6.5', assumes MRI for the engine
• engine only like ruby and truffleruby, uses the latest stable release of that implementation
• .ruby-version reads from the project’s .ruby-version file
• .tool-versions reads from the project’s .tool-versions file
• mise.toml reads from the project’s mise.toml file
• If the ruby-version input is not specified, .ruby-version is tried first, followed by .tool-versions, followed by mise.toml

Working Directory

The working-directory input can be set to resolve .ruby-version, .tool-versions, mise.toml and Gemfile.lock if they are not at the root of the repository, see action.yml for details.

RubyGems

By default, the default RubyGems version that comes with each Ruby is used. However, users can optionally customize the RubyGems version that they want by setting the rubygems input.

See action.yml for more details about the rubygems input.

If you’re running into ArgumentError: wrong number of arguments (given 4, expected 1) errors with a stacktrace including Psych and RubyGems entries, you should be able to fix them by setting rubygems: 3.0.0 or higher.

Bundler

By default, Bundler is installed as follows:

• If there is a Gemfile.lock file (or $BUNDLE_LOCKFILE, $BUNDLE_GEMFILE.lock, or gems.locked) with a BUNDLED WITH section, that version of Bundler will be installed and used.
• If the Ruby ships with Bundler 2.2+ (as a default gem), that version is used.
• Otherwise, the latest compatible Bundler version is installed (Bundler 2 on Ruby >= 2.3, Bundler 1 on Ruby < 2.3).

This behavior can be customized, see action.yml for more details about the bundler input.

Caching bundle install automatically

This action provides a way to automatically run bundle install and cache the result:

    - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      with:
        bundler-cache: true

Note that any step doing bundle install (for the root Gemfile) or gem install bundler can be removed with bundler-cache: true.

This caching speeds up installing gems significantly and avoids too many requests to RubyGems.org.
It needs a Gemfile (or $BUNDLE_GEMFILE or gems.rb) under the working-directory.
If there is a Gemfile.lock (or $BUNDLE_LOCKFILE, $BUNDLE_GEMFILE.lock, or gems.locked), bundle config --local deployment true is used.

To use a Gemfile which is not at the root or has a different name, set BUNDLE_GEMFILE in the env at the job level as shown in the example.

bundle config

When using bundler-cache: true you might notice there is no good place to run bundle config ... commands. These can be replaced by BUNDLE_* environment variables, which are also faster. They should be set in the env at the job level as shown in the example. To find the correct the environment variable name, see the Bundler docs or look at .bundle/config after running bundle config --local KEY VALUE locally. You might need to "-quote the environment variable name in YAML if it has unusual characters like /.

To perform caching, this action will use bundle config --local path $PWD/vendor/bundle.
Therefore, the Bundler path should not be changed in your workflow for the cache to work (no bundle config path).

How it Works

When there is no lockfile, one is generated with bundle lock, which is the same as bundle install would do first before actually fetching any gem. In other words, it works exactly like bundle install. The hash of the generated lockfile is then used for caching, which is the only correct approach.

Dealing with a corrupted cache

In some rare scenarios (like using gems with C extensions whose functionality depends on libraries found on the system at the time of the gem’s build) it may be necessary to ignore contents of the cache and get and build all the gems anew. In order to achieve this, set the cache-version option to any value other than 0 (or change it to a new unique value if you have already used it before.)

    - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      with:
        bundler-cache: true
        cache-version: 1

Caching bundle install manually

It is also possible to cache gems manually, but this is not recommended because it is verbose and very difficult to do correctly. There are many concerns which means using actions/cache is never enough for caching gems (e.g., incomplete cache key, cleaning old gems when restoring from another key, correctly hashing the lockfile if not checked in, OS versions, ABI compatibility for ruby-head, etc). So, please use bundler-cache: true instead and report any issue.

Authentication Token

By default, this action uses ${{ github.token }} to authenticate when downloading Ruby release assets from GitHub. This helps avoid rate limiting issues.

If you’re running this action on a GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) instance, or if you’re experiencing rate limiting, you can provide a custom token:

    - uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      with:
        token: ${{ secrets.MY_GITHUB_TOKEN }}

In most cases, you don’t need to set this input as the default value is sufficient for use on github.com.

Windows

Note that running CI on Windows can be quite challenging if you are not very familiar with Windows. It is recommended to first get your build working on Ubuntu and macOS before trying Windows.

• Use Bundler 2.2.18+ on Windows (older versions have bugs) by not setting the bundler: input and ensuring there is no BUNDLED WITH 1.x.y in a checked-in Gemfile.lock.
• The default shell on Windows is not Bash but PowerShell. This can lead issues such as multi-line scripts not working as expected.
• The PATH contains multiple compiler toolchains. Use where.exe to debug which tool is used.
• For Ruby ≥ 2.4, MSYS2 is prepended to the Path, similar to what RubyInstaller2 does.
• For Ruby < 2.4, the DevKit MSYS tools are installed and prepended to the Path.
• When compiling extension code, note that the packages required to build Ruby are included when using Windows 2022. Additional packages can be installed with setup-ruby-pkgs or via MSYS2’s pacman. These packages may be required when installing or updating Ruby stdlib extension gems.

Versioning

It is highly recommended to use ruby/setup-ruby@v1 for the version of this action. This will provide the best experience by automatically getting bug fixes, new Ruby versions and new features.

If you instead choose a specific version (v1.2.3) or a commit sha, there will be no automatic bug fixes and it will be your responsibility to update every time the action no longer works. Make sure to always use the latest release before reporting an issue on GitHub.

This action follows semantic versioning with a moving v1 branch. This follows the recommendations of GitHub Actions.

Using self-hosted runners

This action might work with self-hosted runners if the Runner Image is very similar to the ones used by GitHub runners. Notably:

• Make sure to use the same operating system and version.
• Make sure to use the same version of libssl.
• Make sure that the operating system has libyaml-0 and libgmp installed
• The default tool cache directory (/opt/hostedtoolcache on Linux, /Users/runner/hostedtoolcache on macOS, C:/hostedtoolcache/windows on Windows) must be writable by the runner user. This is necessary since the Ruby builds embed the install path when built and cannot be moved around.
• /home/runner must be writable by the runner user.

In other cases, you will need to install Ruby in the runner tool cache as shown by the action when it detects that case (run it so it will show you where to install Ruby). You could of course also not use this action and e.g. use Ruby from a system package or use a Docker image instead.

See also the self-hosted: input. You can set it to true if you want to use custom-built Rubies in your self-hosted toolcache instead of prebuild Rubies.

History

This action used to be at eregon/use-ruby-action and was moved to the ruby organization. Please update if you are using eregon/use-ruby-action.

Credits

The creator of this action is @eregon. The current maintainers are @eregon @MSP-Greg @ntkme. Most of the Windows logic is based on work by MSP-Greg. Many thanks to MSP-Greg and Lars Kanis for the help with Ruby Installer.