Compiling Python 3.8.3 on Ubuntu 18.04
How to compile Python 3.8.3 on a Ubuntu 18.04 system and set up a virtual environment with venv.
Instructions
Download the XZ compressed source tarball (the download link is from the Python 3.8.3 release page).
Unpack the tarball with tar -xf Python-3.8.3.tar.xz and cd into the Python-3.8.3 directory.
Read ./configure to figure out what features you want and run ./configure with appropriate parameters, then make and make altinstall. This is what I settled on:
./configure --enable-optimizations --with-lto --with-system-expat --with-ensurepip=yes --enable-loadable-sqlite-extensions --enable-ipv6 --prefix=/home/thomas/prg/python/3.8.3
make
make altinstall
Because of the --prefix parameter, the path to my freshly built Python binary is
~/prg/python/3.8.3/bin/python3.8
I like to run Python in a virtual environment using venv and a nice alias:
~/prg/python/3.8.3/bin/python3.8 -m venv ~/.venv/p383
alias p3='source ~/.venv/p383/bin/activate'
Might as well upgrade pip:
p3 # the alias defined above
pip install --upgrade pip
Troubleshooting “The necessary bits to build these optional modules were not found”
The first time I ran ./configure and make I got the message:
The necessary bits to build these optional modules were not found:
_dbm _gdbm _sqlite3
_uuid readline
Apparently I was missing a couple of packages. I added the following:
sudo apt install libreadline-dev uuid-dev libsqlite3-dev libgdbm-dev
And with that, make could build all optional modules except _dbm.
Loose ends
I’m left with a couple of loose ends:
- I couldn’t build the
_dbmmodule. - I tried calling
./configurewith--with-system-ffibut I got a warning that it wouldn’t work on my system so I removed it. - I tried calling
./configurewith--enable-sharedbut this causedmaketo fail with a weird tokenization error.
I’ll dig into this next time I compile Python, if I remember.