About swift-linux
An installation guide for setting up Swift for non-UI development on Debian 12. It covers prerequisites, downloading and extracting the toolchain, updating PATH, and verifying the installation.
Key features
- 01Debian 12 prerequisites
- 02Swift toolchain download
- 03Archive extraction steps
- 04PATH configuration
- 05Installation verification
Use cases
- 01Preparing Debian 12 for Swift development
- 02Installing Swift in a workspace directory
- 03Checking a Swift installation
Install
Copy the command and run it in a terminal.
npx skills add https:/ / github.com/ openhands/ extensions --skill swift-linuxAfter installing, type/swift-linuxin Claude Code to confirm it loaded.
Bundled files.plugin/plugin.jsonREADME.md
Details
From the project READMESwift 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
-
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.gzWhere
<VERSION>is the Swift version number (e.g.,6.0.3). -
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
- Extract the archive:
Note: Make sure to install Swift in the
/workspacedirectory, but outside the git repository to avoid committing the Swift binaries.
- Add Swift to your PATH by adding the following line to your
~/.bashrcfile:
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