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I have a fresh installation of Raspbian Lite. This one comes with Python 2.7 and 3.7 and no pip installed. I wanted to install Python 3.9.1 and followed the instructions from here.

To briefly state the steps given there: Install dependencies, extract Python from the downloaded archive, ./configure --enable-optimizations, make and make altinstall.

After completing the installation I realised that Python was installed in /usr/local/bin/python3.9 and pip is installed in usr/local/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pip. While the other Python installations are in /usr/bin/.

  1. Can I (Should I?) somehow have it installed in /usr/bin/?
  2. In the future if I want to install Python and pip in /usr/bin/ what should I change in the above set of commands? I remember seeing in an tutorial article(that I am unable to find now) that they pass additional arguments to ./configure that seemed like specifying the directory to install python in.
  3. Now that it is installed there, I can directly set alias in .bashrc for python3.9 and pip3.9 as python and pip, right?
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  • If you choose to install 3.9 you should use the default (correct) directory. There is no need to fiddle with .bashrc - progams installed in /usr/local/bin will run in preference to /usr/bin. You could run specific versions with python3.9 or python3.7 – Milliways Jan 8 at 22:57
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  1. No. Do not install it in /usr/bin. /usr/bin is for programs installed by the package manager. If you install packages manually, they go in /usr/local/bin (or ~/.local/bin etc.).
  2. You can use the --prefix option of the configure script to select the folder to install it to, by default the prefix is /usr/local. As mentioned in (1), don't set it to /usr or you'll break things.
  3. Yes.
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  • Hi, thanks a lot. After adding these two to .bashrc I updated pip using python3.9 -m pip install --upgrade pip. It showed a small message saying "Defaulting to user installation because normal site-packages is not writable". This is normal, right? After this pip is installed in ~/.local/lib/python3.9/site-packages while setuptools is in /usr/local/lib/.... It seems now all new packages install to ~/.local/lib/... – Shrinivas Iyengar Jan 8 at 18:16
  • 3. NO! Setting an alias to python is a bad idea, because there are still (old?) programs that expect python2 with that. These programs may fail. The best is, always to call python3. – Ingo Jan 8 at 18:38

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