Install Python on linux2 ec2

AWS or Amazon web services is a cloud service platform that provides on-demand computational services, databases, storage space, and many more services. EC2 or Elastic Compute Cloud is a scalable computing service launched on the AWS cloud platform. In simpler words, EC2 is nothing but just someone elses computer. In this article we will install python on out ec2 Instance.

Prerequisites

Installing Python from the source code requires a GCC compiler. So must have installed the required development libraries first.

Open a terminal on your system install prerequisites for Python:

sudo yum install gcc openssl-devel bzip2-devel libffi-devel -y

Step 1 - Download Python 3.9

Visit Python official download page and download the required Python on your system. Alternatively, You can use the following command to download Python 3.9 on a local machine.

You can/must always check for the latest version.

cd /opt 
sudo wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.6/Python-3.9.6.tgz

After the download is finished, extract the archive file.

sudo tar xzf Python-3.9.6.tgz

Step 2 - Install Python 3.9

Use the below set of commands to compile Python 3.9 from the source code and install using the altinstall command.

cd Python-3.9.6 
sudo ./configure --enable-optimizations 
sudo make altinstall

make altinstall is used to prevent replacing the default python binary file /usr/bin/python.

Now remove the downloaded source archive file from your system

sudo rm -f /opt/Python-3.9.6.tgz

Step 3 - Check Python Version

The Python 3.9 binary is installed under /usr/local/bin directory. As we have not overwritten the current Python version, you need to run Python 3.9 command as following:

python3.9 -V

output: Python 3.9.*

Step 4 - Create Python Virtual Environment

Python provides to create an isolated environment for the applications. Where you can create an environment directory with a specific Python version. This will contains application-specific packages.

Use the following command to create environment directory:

python3.9 -m venv env

The above command will create a directory “env” in the current directory containing all the required files for the isolated environment.

Every time you need to make changes in the environment, Use the below command to active it.

source env/bin/activate

After activating the environment, you can work with your application.

Once your work is finished, use the following command to deactivate the Python environment.

deactivate

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned to install Python 3.9 on Amazon Linux using source code.