How do you uninstall rbenv on macOS?

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