How To Install Python 3.8 on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Python 3.8 on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Python is an open-source and beginner-friendly programming language. Python 3.8 is the latest major release of the Python language. It includes many new features such as assignment expressions, positional-only parameters, f-strings support, and more.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Python 3.8 on a Debian 10 (Buster) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Python 3.8 on Debian 10 Buster

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

apt update

Step 2. Installing Python 3.8 on Debian 10.

First, install the packages necessary to build Python source:

sudo apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libgdbm-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev libffi-dev wget

Next, download the latest release’s source code from the Python download page:

wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.2/Python-3.8.2.tar.xz

Once the download is complete, extract the tarball:

tar -xf Python-3.8.2.tar.xz

Next, compile Python source code on your system:

cd Python-3.8.2
./configure --enable-optimizations

Run make to start the build process:

make -j 4
sudo make altinstall

Once the process is complete, check the version of Python 3.8:

$ python3.8 --version
Python 3.8.2

Step 3. Creating a Virtual Environment.

First, create the project directory and switch to it:

mkdir ~/my_app_idroot && cd ~/my_app_idroot

From inside the project root run the following command to create a virtual environment named my_app_idroot_venv:

python3.8 -m venv my_app_venv

Activate the environment:

source my_app_venv/bin/activate

Within the virtual environment, you can use pip instead of pip3.8 and python instead of python3.8:

(my_app_idroot_venv) $ python -v

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Python. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Python 3 on your Debian 10 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Python website.