Featured AI Products
Compute
Build, deploy, and scale cloud compute resources
Containers and Images
Safely store and manage containers and backups
Managed Databases
Fully managed resources running popular database engines
Management and Dev Tools
Control infrastructure and gather insights
Networking
Secure and control traffic to apps
Security
Help protect your account and resources with these security features
Storage
Store and access any amount of data reliably in the cloud
Browse all products
AI/ML
CMS
Data and IoT
Developer Tools
Gaming and Media
Hosting
Security and Networking
Startups and SMBs
Web and App Platforms
See all solutions
Community
Documentation
Developer Tools
Get Involved
Utilities and Help
Become a Partner
Marketplace
Pricing

- Community
- DigitalOcean
- Community
- DigitalOcean

How to install a specific Python version on Ubuntu?

Posted on March 1, 2021

Linux Basics

Linux Commands

Python

Ubuntu

By Bobby

In some cases, you might need to install a very specific Python version on your Ubuntu server which might be different from the one that comes from the default apt repositories.

Here is how you could do that!

This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

These answers are provided by our Community. If you find them useful, show some love by clicking the heart. If you run into issues leave a comment, or add your own answer to help others.

Bobby

March 1, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

Thank you for reporting this.

This is going to be beyond the scope of the tutorial. However here is how you could install a specific version if needed:

First, install the required libraries:

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev openssl make gcc

Then choose the specific Python from here:

https://www.python.org/ftp/python/

After that go to the /opt directory and download the archive of the specific version:

cd /opt
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.9.2/Python-3.9.2.tgz

Extract the archive:

tar xzvf Python-3.9.2.tgz

Then cd into the directory:

cd Python-3.9.2

And finally, compile the new version:

./configure
make
make install

Finally you can create a symlink for that specific Python version so that you could use the binary from anywhere:

sudo ln -fs /opt/Python-3.9.2/Python /usr/bin/python3.9

Then you could check if the python3.9 version is available:

python3.9 --version

Hope that this helps. Regards, Bobby

The developer cloud

Scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

View all products

Start building today

From GPU-powered inference and Kubernetes to managed databases and storage, get everything you need to build, scale, and deploy intelligent applications.