Can I safely uninstall Ruby?

by

I wish to remove non-critical packages to limit exposure to potential security vulnerabilities.

I never use Ruby.

Does removing Ruby will increase security or break other parts of the system ?

Answer

If your package manager installed Ruby to begin with, then something on your system needs it.

The easiest way to find out what needs it is to test an attempt to remove the package. For instance:

# yum remove ruby
...
================================================================================
 Package         Arch      Version                Repository               Size
================================================================================
Removing:
 ruby            x86_64    1.8.7.352-12.el6_4     @updates                1.8 M
Removing for dependencies:
 facter          x86_64    1:1.7.3-1.el6          @puppetlabs-products    235 k
 hiera           noarch    1.2.1-1.el6            @puppetlabs-products     46 k
 puppet          noarch    3.3.0-1.el6            @puppetlabs-products    3.5 M
 ruby-irb        x86_64    1.8.7.352-12.el6_4     @updates                1.0 M
 ruby-rdoc       x86_64    1.8.7.352-12.el6_4     @updates                1.3 M
 ruby-rgen       noarch    0.6.5-1.el6            @puppetlabs-deps        315 k
 rubygem-json    x86_64    1.5.5-1.el6            @puppetlabs-deps        989 k
 rubygems        noarch    1.3.7-1.el6            @base                   711 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Remove        9 Package(s)

Installed size: 9.9 M
Is this ok [y/N]: n
Exiting on user Command

So on my system, I see that it’s needed by puppet. Since I actually need puppet, I will not remove ruby.

Similarly on Debian-based systems:

# apt-get remove ruby
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
  libshadow-ruby1.8 irb1.8 libaugeas0 rdoc libruby ruby1.8 rdoc1.8
  libaugeas-ruby1.8 puppet-common libruby1.8 libopenssl-ruby1.8
  libreadline-ruby1.8 libreadline5 libopenssl-ruby augeas-lenses
  libxmlrpc-ruby
Use 'apt-get autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  facter puppet ruby
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 to remove and 48 not upgraded.
After this operation, 983kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? n
Abort.

Attribution
Source : Link , Question Author : boblapointe , Answer Author : Michael Hampton

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