Update or remove Ruby 2.6

macOS Tahoe ships with Ruby 2.6.10 which was End Of Life in April 2022 (https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/downloads/branches/). How can I either upgrade it to Ruby 3.4.7 or delete it, so that my mac meets minimum cybersecurity requirements?

I use rbenv for more recent versions of Ruby at the moment so don't need any suggestions on how to do add them, I just need rid of the dangerously out of date system Ruby, thanks.

Answered by DTS Engineer in 867786022

Ruby is part of the macOS base system. That’s immutable, and so there’s no way for you to “update or remove” it.

Most folks in your situation install the latest Ruby using their mechanism of choice and then change their environment so that they use that version of Ruby by default. However, you wrote:

so that my mac meets minimum cybersecurity requirements?

which suggests that you’re working in some sort of managed environment that imposes these minimum requirements. If so, I recommend that you talk to your site manager about this. They could, for example, deploy an endpoint security client on to your Mac that blocks execution of the built-in Ruby.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Ruby is part of the macOS base system. That’s immutable, and so there’s no way for you to “update or remove” it.

Most folks in your situation install the latest Ruby using their mechanism of choice and then change their environment so that they use that version of Ruby by default. However, you wrote:

so that my mac meets minimum cybersecurity requirements?

which suggests that you’re working in some sort of managed environment that imposes these minimum requirements. If so, I recommend that you talk to your site manager about this. They could, for example, deploy an endpoint security client on to your Mac that blocks execution of the built-in Ruby.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Thanks for getting back to me Quinn. Can you recommend an endpoint security client? We're too small to have a site manager. I'm leading on this, thanks.

We're using FleetDM for MDM if that helps

Can you recommend an endpoint security client?

No, sorry. I support the API [1] but I don’t have any practical experience with the resulting products.

You might have more luck asking this question over in the Apple Support Community, run by Apple Support, and specifically in the Business and Education topic area.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

[1] Well, these days Kevin handles most of the ES questions.

Jamf etc are a nightmare, so I'll go with Santa.

Apple still need to remove Ruby 2.6 though, it's been 3.5+ years without any security updates...

Thanks again for your time Quinn 🙏

Apple still need to remove Ruby 2.6 though

Unfortunately it’s hard to do without breaking folks. We actually talk about this in the macOS Catalina 10.15 Release Notes.

Share and Enjoy

Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
let myEmail = "eskimo" + "1" + "@" + "apple.com"

Update or remove Ruby 2.6
 
 
Q