How to Compile CPython on Debian-Based Linux

This is a short blog post to remind myself how to compile CPython from its source.

You need to get the source files for Python as you need to give the C compiler (and other tools) the needed instructions for producing machine code. The CPython source is available on Github. Using git, you can download with

$ git clone https://github.com/python/cpython.git

You should install build-essential which provides tooling for building Debian packages. This can be done with apt:

$ sudo apt install build-essential

Next install these assorted packages:

$ sudo apt install libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev libgdbm-dev libdb5.3-dev libbz2-dev liblzma-dev libffi-dev

Here is a brief description of each package:

Install	Package	Description
libssl-dev	Secure Sockets Layer toolkit - development files	This package is part of the OpenSSL project’s implementation of the SSL and TLS crypographic protocols for secure communication over the internet.
zlib1g-dev	Compression library - development	zlib is a library implementing the deflate compression method found in gzip and PKZIP.
libncurses5-dev	Transitional pacakge for libncurses-dev	Package prociding libncurses5-dev.
libncursesw5-dev	Transitional package for libncurses-dev	Package providing libncursesw5-dev.
libreadline-dev	GNU readline and history libraries, development files	The GNU readline library aids in the consistency of user interface across discrete programs that need to provide a command line interace
libsqlite3-dev	libsqlite3-dev	SQLite is a C library that implements an SQL database engine.
libgdbm-dev	GNU dbm database routines (development files)	GNU dbm (‘gdbm’) is a library of database functions that use extensible hashing and works similarly to the standard UNIX ‘dbm’ functions.
libdb5.3-dev	Berkeley v5.3 Database Libraries [development]	This is the development package which contains headers and static libraries for the Berkely v5.3 database library
libbz2-dev	High-quality block-sorting file compressor library - development	Static libraries and include files for the bzip2 compressor library
liblzma-dev	XZ-format compression library - development files	XZ is the successor to the Lempel-Ziv/Markov-chain Algorithm compression format, which provides memory-hungry but powerful compressoin (often better than bzip2) and fast, easy decompression.
libffi-dev	Foreign Fucntion Interface library (development files)	This package contains the headers and static library files necessary for building programs which use libffi

Now run the configuration tool that the Python dev’s have kindly prepared. It will prepare a makefile for everything you need to build CPython.

$ ./configure --with-pydebug

The --with-pydebug tells configure to use a debugging hook.

Finally, you can just run make.

$ make

That’s pretty much it. If you want to silence the large standard output, you can add an -s. By default make will compile the first target specified in the make file, which for this project is actually the entirety of CPython itself. You can specify special build targets related to building, testing, installation, and other topics.