how to install python 3.8 in Ubuntu virtualenv from source file (.tgz)

Question

I cannot install packages using pip install <packagename> because I am behind the security wall.

I need to install python 3.8 in Ubuntu 16.04 server's virtualenv which originally has python 3.5.2

For that, I manually installed virtualenv-20.0.28-py2.py3-none-any.whl on the server after (manually) installing all its dependencies. Then I created a virtualenv by virtualenv pytorch ( pytorch is the name of virtual env) and activated it by source pytorch/bin/activate .

Now I am in the env mode

(pytorch) user@ubuntu:~/my_packages$

when I did pip install Python-3.8.0.tgz it output the below error:

Processing ./Python-3.8.0.tgz
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1:
 command: /home/user/my_packages/pytorch/bin/python -c 'import sys, setuptools, tokenize; sys.argv[0] = '"'"'/tmp/pip-req-build-9npp4vja/setup.py'"'"'; __file__='"'"'/tmp/pip-req-build-9npp4vja/setup.py'"'"';f=getattr(tokenize, '"'"'open'"'"', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('"'"'\r\n'"'"', '"'"'\n'"'"');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, '"'"'exec'"'"'))' egg_info --egg-base /tmp/pip-pip-egg-info-1d52yt0i
     cwd: /tmp/pip-req-build-9npp4vja/
Complete output (9 lines):
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/tmp/pip-req-build-9npp4vja/setup.py", line 2433, in <module>
    main()
  File "/tmp/pip-req-build-9npp4vja/setup.py", line 2392, in main
    set_compiler_flags('LDFLAGS', 'PY_LDFLAGS_NODIST')
  File "/tmp/pip-req-build-9npp4vja/setup.py", line 85, in set_compiler_flags
    sysconfig.get_config_vars()[compiler_flags] = flags + ' ' + py_flags_nodist
TypeError: Can't convert 'NoneType' object to str implicitly
    ----------------------------------------
ERROR: Command errored out with exit status 1: python setup.py egg_info Check the logs for full command output.

How do I install python 3.8 onto pytorch environment?

Note that I can only install packages manually

Answer 1

Virtualenv requires that you actually have the wanted python version installed.

Depending on what "security wall" means, pip install <> should still work for typical user-wide installation but it will install modules only into your local site-modules ( ~/.local/lib/python... ).

There are multiple ways to run different version of python without installing them system-wide. At the end you could simply download the python binary and run it but that wouldn't be really practical to manage. As alternative you could use something like anaconda or pyenv.