Here are my results on a Debian jessie box: If you just want to play with the REPL (usr/bin/swift in the Ubuntu 14.04 snapshot), all you have to do is: apt-

Here are my results on a Debian jessie box: If you just want to play with the REPL (usr/bin/swift in the Ubuntu 14.04 snapshot), all you have to do is: apt-get install python-dev If you want to actually compile swift files (usr/bin/swiftc in the Ubuntu 14.04 snapshot), it appears extremely basic programs will compile with jessie's clang-3.5, so all you have to do is: apt-get install clang Note that the swift.org instructions claim you need clang-3.6, and you probably do for more complex programs. For that, you'll need to temporarily add a sid/unstable source and upgrade clang: echo 'deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list apt-get update apt-get install clang (don't forget to remove the unstable line afterwards).