How to install Python 3 on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

By Rob Terzi August 13, 2018September 20, 2018

This article shows how to install Python 3, pip, venv, virtualenv, and pipenv on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. After following the steps in this article, you should be in a good position to follow many Python guides and tutorials using RHEL.

Using Python virtual environments is a best practice to isolate project-specific dependencies and create reproducible environments. Other tips and FAQs for working with Python and software collections on RHEL 7 are also covered.

There are a number of different ways to get Python 3 installed on RHEL. This article uses Red Hat Software Collections because these give you a current Python installation that is built and supported by Red Hat. During development, support might not seem that important to you. However, support is important to those who have to deploy and operate the applications you write. To understand why this is important, consider what happens when your application is in production and a critical security vulnerability in a core library (for example SSL/TLS) is discovered. This type of scenario is why many enterprises use Red Hat.

Python 3.6 is used in this article. It was the most recent, stable release when this was written. However, you should be able to use these instructions for any of the versions of Python in Red Hat Software Collections including 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, and future collections such as 3.7.