Installation: Debian and Ubuntu

This page describes how to install sup from both repositories and rubygems on recent versions of Ubuntu and Debian.

You might want to prepend commands with sudo where root access is needed.

Install from repository

Installing the sup-mail Debian package is as simple as

apt-get install sup-mail

Note that the sup binary is renamed to sup-mail in the Debian package.

Install from rubygems

Install required system packages

apt-get install build-essential libncursesw5-dev uuid-dev zlib1g-dev

Install Ruby, Rubygems, and Rake

• Install system Ruby: run apt-get install ruby-full rubygems rake.
• Or install Ruby via rvm or rbenv.

Install Sup via rubygems

gem install sup # sudo is not needed if not using system ruby

Note: On a freshly set-up Debian 8.1 with a virgin ruby installation, you might get an error while trying to install the latest version of Sup, which is thanks to a missing library (xapian). Easily fixed by fetching the native Debian version straight from the repository (apt-get install ruby-xapian) and running the above commands again ;)

If you get No such file or directory -- /usr/share/rubygems-integration/all/gems/rake-12.3.1/exe/rake, installing fresh rake via rubygems (gem install rake) might help.

If installation fails on xapian-ruby without any specific error message, try installing that package first (gem install xapian-ruby) and then sup.

If you can't or don't want to install gems globally, there's always the option to install them under your home directory (~/.gem/) with gem install --user-install <gemname>. Then you need to also make sure you have gem binaries in your path. That you can achieve for example by appending PATH="$HOME/.gem/ruby/2.5.0/bin:$PATH" to your ~/.profile.

Rubygems PATH issue on old systems

On Debian 6.0 and lower (and other old Ubuntu systems), You'll have to manually add /var/lib/gems/2.X.X/bin to PATH environment variable. Or you'll get an command not found error when running sup.

Next step

See New User Guide.

On even older versions of Debian / Ubuntu

See this page if you're on a really old system and previous instructions still doesn't work.