Our first program will print the classic “hello world” message. Here’s the full source code.

An empty puts prints an empty line

You can also use p instead of puts.

It’s shorter and gives a bit more detail about what gets printed to the standard output. Note the surrounding quotes in the output.

To run the program, put the code in hello-world.rb and use the ruby command like so:

Now that we can run a basic Ruby program, let’s learn more about the language.