Installing the latest Python 3 on Raspberry Pi

Over the weekend, working on a personal Python project on the Raspberry Pi, I decided to get the latest version of the Python 3 branch.

The default OS of the Raspberry Pi comes with Python 3, but it is usually a couple of releases behind the latest stable version. At the time of writing this post, the latest stable version of the Python 3 branch is 3.7 and the Rapsbain version is 3.5.

Since the Raspbian repositories are updated, you will need to download and install the latest version manually. Below are the steps to get it working

Download and extract

Download and extract the latest version of Python 3 as root under as below

pi@ai-pi:~ $ sudo su
root@ai-pi:/home/pi# cd /usr/src
root@ai-pi:/usr/src# wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.0/Python-3.7.0.tgz
root@ai-pi:/usr/src# ar -xf Python-3.7.0.tgz

Install Dependencies

Since you are doing a manual install, you will need to install the dependencies manually

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential tk-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev libreadline6-dev libdb5.3-dev libgdbm-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev libexpat1-dev liblzma-dev zlib1g-dev libffi-dev

Configure and Install Python 3

Run configure with optimizations and make install from the source

root@ai-pi:/usr/src# cd Python-3.7.0
root@ai-pi:/usr/src/Python-3.7.0#./configure --enable-optimizations
root@ai-pi:/usr/src/Python-3.7.0#make altinstall

Update the links

Update the link to the newly installed version of Python. Since I wanted to leave the default python 2, I only updated the python 3 link

root@ai-pi:/usr/src/Python-3.7.0# ln -s /usr/local/bin/python3.7 /usr/local/bin/python3

Verify

Verify the python 3 version

root@ai-pi:/usr/src/Python-3.7.0# python3 --version
Python 3.7.0

Clean up

Optionally clean up the src

root@ai-pi:/usr/src# rm -Rf Python-3.7.0
root@ai-pi:/usr/src# rm Python-3.7.0.tgz

You can revert back to the default python 3 version anytime by simply updating the link created above. Also keep in mind updating raspbian will likely break this and you may have to recreate the links if needed.