Swift Installation Guide for Debian Linux

This document provides instructions for installing Swift on Debian 12 (Bookworm).

This setup is intended for non-UI development tasks on Swift on Linux. On Windows, run these Debian commands inside WSL2 or a Linux container. For native Windows Swift, use the Windows toolchain from Swift.org instead.

Prerequisites

Before installing Swift, you need to install the required dependencies for your system. You can find the most up-to-date list of dependencies for your specific Linux distribution and version at the Swift.org tarball installation guide.

FOR EXAMPLE, the dependencies you may need to install for Debian 12 could be:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y \
  binutils-gold \
  gcc \
  git \
  libcurl4-openssl-dev \
  libedit-dev \
  libicu-dev \
  libncurses-dev \
  libpython3-dev \
  libsqlite3-dev \
  libxml2-dev \
  pkg-config \
  tzdata \
  uuid-dev

Download and Install Swift

1. Find the latest Swift version for Debian:

   Go to the Swift.org download page to find the latest Swift version compatible with Debian 12 (Bookworm).

   Look for a tarball named something like swift-<VERSION>-RELEASE-debian12.tar.gz (e.g., swift-6.0.3-RELEASE-debian12.tar.gz).

   The URL pattern is typically:

   https://download.swift.org/swift-<VERSION>-release/debian12/swift-<VERSION>-RELEASE/swift-<VERSION>-RELEASE-debian12.tar.gz
   

   Where <VERSION> is the Swift version number (e.g., 6.0.3).

2. Download the Swift binary for Debian 12:

cd /workspace
wget https://download.swift.org/swift-6.0.3-release/debian12/swift-6.0.3-RELEASE/swift-6.0.3-RELEASE-debian12.tar.gz

3. Extract the archive:

Note: Make sure to install Swift in the /workspace directory, but outside the git repository to avoid committing the Swift binaries.

4. Add Swift to your PATH by adding the following line to your ~/.bashrc file:

echo 'export PATH=/workspace/swift-6.0.3-RELEASE-debian12/usr/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Note: Make sure to update the version number in the PATH to match the version you downloaded.

Verify Installation

Verify that Swift is correctly installed by running:

swift --version