How to Install Swift in Ubuntu

Swift is a popular programming language used for developing programs and apps for any of Apple’s devices such as iphone, ipads and Mac. Although it was initially meant for only Mac devices, Apple has recently started supporting Swift language for Linux systems as well. In this article, we will look at how to install Swift in Ubuntu.

How to Install Swift in Ubuntu

Here are the steps to install Swift in Ubuntu. We will look at how to get started with Swift programming language in Linux, and also write a simple “Hello World” program.

1. Download Swift

Apple has already provided snapshots for Ubuntu. You can download it from this link on Apple website. You can also download it using wget command

Ubuntu 14.04

$ sudo wget https://swift.org/builds/ubuntu1404/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2015-12-10-b/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2015-12-01-b-ubuntu14.04.tar.gz

Ubuntu 15.04

$ sudo wget https://swift.org/builds/ubuntu1510/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2015-12-10-a/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2015-12-10-a-ubuntu15.10.tar.gz

2. Extract Downloaded Files

Use tar command to extract the .tar.gz file downloaded above.

$ sudo tar -xvzf swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT*

3. Setup Environment Variables

Once you have extracted files, you need to add the location to its binary file to your system’s environment variable.

cd swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT*
cd usr/bin
pwd

We basically navigate to the usr/bin subfolder inside the extracted folder and run pwd command to get its full path.

Next, include that path in $PATH variable with the following command

export PATH=path_to_swift_usr_bin:$PATH

So if the path to usr/bin folder on your system is

/home/john/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2021-07-01-a-ubuntu15.10/usr/bin

then run the following command

export PATH=/home/john/swift-2.2-SNAPSHOT-2021-07-01-a-ubuntu15.10/usr/bin:$PATH

4. Install Dependencies

Run the following command swift dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install clang libicu-dev

5. Verify installation

You can verify installation with the following command. It will display the version of Swift on your system.

$ swift -version

If you run swift command without any options, then it will open swift shell where you can run swift commands. Type :q to exit the shell.

$ swift
>

6. Create First Swift Program

Now we will create a very simple Swift application just for testing purposes. Run the following command to create Test directory to hold all required files for our Swift application.

$ sudo mkdir Test
$ cd Test

You need to create a Package.swift file in this folder. Every Swift project needs to have this file.

$ sudo touch Package.swift

Create a directory Source inside our project folder and create main.swift file in it.

$ sudo mkdir Sources
$ sudo vi Sources/main.swift

Add the following line to print “Hello world” when you run this application.

print("Hello, world")

Save and close the file.

Run the following command to generate the executable file for your application.

$ sudo swift build

You will find the executable in .build/debug/Test. Simply enter the full file path of your executable in terminal to run the program. You will see the output “Hello world”. It is similar to running a shell script from terminal.

$ .build/debug/Hello
Hello world

That’s it. In this article, we have learnt how to install Swift application in your system.

How to Install Swift in Ubuntu