How To Install Python on Rocky Linux 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Python on Rocky Linux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Python is one of the most popular high-level languages, focusing on high-level and object-oriented applications. Generally, Python is used in automation, scripting, data analysis, machine learning, back-end development, handling big data, and performing complex mathematics. Python has been around since the late 1980s and continues to be one of the most popular languages in use today.

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 the Python Programming Language on Rocky Linux. 8.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems:  Rocky Linux 8.
• 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 on Rocky Linux 8

Step 1. The first step is to update your system to the latest version of the package list. To do so, run the following commands:

sudo dnf check-update
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install gcc openssl-devel bzip2-devel libffi-devel zlib-devel wget make

Step 2. Installing Python Programming Language on Rocky Linux 8.

By default, Python is available on Rocky Linux 8 base repository. Now run the following command below to download the latest version of Python 3.10 from the official page:

wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.11.2/Python-3.11.2.tgz

Next, extract the downloaded file:

tar -xf Python-3.11.2.tar.xz

After that, change the directory to the extracted directory and configure Python:

cd Python-3.11.2
./configure --enable-optimizations

Finally, install Python 3.10 by running the following command below:

make -j 2
nproc
make altinstall

Check the version of the installation:

python3.11 --version

Output:

Python 3.11.2

Step 3. Installing Python 3.10 Modules.

Run the following command to download and install the requests module for Python 3.10:

python3.11 -m pip install [module]

For example, we will install the requests module:

python3.11 -m pip install chpl-magic

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Python. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Python 3.10 on your Rocky Linux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Python website.