How to Install Swift on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Swift is a safe, fast, expressive general-purpose programming language build for the software design patterns. It is best for the systems programming, to mobile and desktop applications. Swift provides a large number of features that make programming easier while giving the developer the control needed in a true systems programming language.

This tutorial will help you to install swift programming language on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Linux system.

Step 1 – Prerequisites

Login to your Ubuntu 18.04 system using SSH (Shell) access. Now install the required dependencies for swift installation on your system.

sudo apt-get install clang

For the new Ubuntu 18.04 installation, I also needed to install following packages to work swift properly.

sudo apt-get install libcurl3 libpython2.7 libpython2.7-dev 

Step 2 – Install Swift Ubuntu 18.04

Now, you need to download the latest available swift release from its official site. You can use below command to download Swift 4.2.1 on the Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic system.

wget https://swift.org/builds/swift-4.2.1-release/ubuntu1804/swift-4.2.1-RELEASE/swift-4.2.1-RELEASE-ubuntu18.04.tar.gz

Then extract the downloaded archive

tar xzf swift-4.2.1-RELEASE-ubuntu18.04.tar.gz
sudo mv swift-4.2.1-RELEASE-ubuntu18.04 /usr/share/swift

Also, configure the swift binary to system’s PATH environment variable.

echo "export PATH=/usr/share/swift/usr/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
source  ~/.bashrc

Step 3 – Verify Swift Version

Use the following command to check the current installed Swift version on your system.

swift --version

Swift version 4.2.1 (swift-4.2.1-RELEASE)
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Step 4 – Swift REPL Examples

Just type swift on your system console and you will get Swift console. You can use this console for quick operations and for the learning purpose.

swift

Welcome to Swift version 4.2.1 (swift-4.2.1-RELEASE). Type :help for assistance.
  1>

Now, run some sample commands to test the console running properly.