pyenv

The pyenv tool allows you to install and manage multiple versions of the Python interpreter. It also supports alternative Python implementations out-of-the-box, allowing you to test your code in different environments.

Under the hood, pyenv is a collection of shell scripts. In particular python-build provides the pyenv install functionality to download the source code, compile and install a given version of the Python executable.

Installation

Linux

The root user needs to install the packages required to build Python from source.

# apt install --no-install-recommends make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev xz-utils tk-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev

No admin rights are required to install and use pyenv itself

$ git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv
$ cd ~/.pyenv && src/configure && make -C src && cd ..
$ ~/.pyenv/bin/pyenv --help

Note that you will have to adapt your $PATH if you want to use the pyenv command directly in your shell, without prepending the full path ~/.pyenv/bin/pyenv.

macOS

We recommend to use a package manager like homebrew.

$ brew install pyenv

Windows

Consider using the pyenv-win port on Windows.

Usage

Start by listing the ~500 Python interpreters that can be installed with pyenv

$ pyenv install --list

Then install any version you need

$ pyenv install <version>

The interpreter will be installed into ~/.pyenv/versions/<version>/. You can use the full path to the binaries to run a specific python interpreter,

$ ~/.pyenv/versions/<version>/bin/python your_python_script.py

or to create a new virtual environment and install packages within.

cd some_python_project/
~/.pyenv/versions/<version>/bin/python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Feel free to adapt $PYENV_ROOT to change the install location. Refer to the pyenv documentation for other ways to manage the Python version in the shell or per-project.