Fix Python – Installing Python 3 on RHEL

Question 1

I’m trying to install python3 on RHEL using the following steps:

yum search python3

Which returned No matches found for: python3

Followed by:

yum search python

None of the search results contained python3. What should I try next?

Question 2

It is easy to install python manually (i.e. build from source):

Download (there may be newer releases on Python.org):

 $ wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.4.3/Python-3.4.3.tar.xz

Unzip
```
 $ tar xf Python-3.* 
 $ cd Python-3.*
```
Prepare compilation
```
 $ ./configure
```
Build
```
 $ make
```
Install
```
 $ make install
```
OR if you don’t want to overwrite the python executable (safer, at least on some distros yum needs python to be 2.x, such as for RHEL6) – you can install python3.* as a concurrent instance to the system default with an altinstall:
```
 $ make altinstall
```

Now if you want an alternative installation directory, you can pass --prefix to the configurecommand.

Example: for ‘installing’ Python in /opt/local, just add --prefix=/opt/local.

After the make install step: In order to use your new Python installation, it could be, that you still have to add the [prefix]/bin to the $PATH and [prefix]/lib to the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH (depending of the --prefix you passed)

Question

Answer