How do I fix the missing libffi dependency error during Ruby 3.4.1 installation on Ubuntu 22.04LTS?

I’m currently updating a legacy Ruby 2.7.1 application to Ruby 3.4.1 and have encountered an error during installation on Ubuntu 22.04LTS. The installation notes I’m following lead me to use rbenv, but the build fails with a missing libffi error for the fiddle extension.

I’ve executed the following commands to set up the environment:

BASHCopied
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install -y build-essential libssl-dev libreadline-dev zlib1g-dev
sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.rbenv/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'eval "$(rbenv init -)"' >> ~/.bashrc

After opening a new terminal, I ran:

BASHCopied
git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git ~/.rbenv/plugins/ruby-build
rbenv install 3.4.1

The build process fails with the following error:

BASHCopied
ruby
/tmp/ruby-build.20250128131333.6609.BBnLjx/ruby-3.4.1/ext/fiddle/extconf.rb:86: missing libffi. Please install libffi or use --with-libffi-source-dir with libffi source location.

I’m unclear on how to install libffi separately, as it appears that with Ruby 2.7.1 the libffi library was handled by post-build steps in RVM. How can I resolve this missing component and successfully install Ruby 3.4.1?

Any help is very much appreciated.