How to install pyenv on Ubuntu

This is a short tutorial on installing pyenv on Ubuntu 20.04.

Pyenv is a python version management tool that you can use to switch between python versions with ease. If you use Pipenv (Pipfile) it can automatically install required python versions using the Pipfile too.

Step 1: Install required packages:

Copy and paste the following lines to your terminal

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev \
libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm \
libncursesw5-dev xz-utils tk-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev libffi-devinstaller liblzma-dev

Step 2: Install Pyenv with the installer:

curl https://pyenv.run | bash

Step 3: Add these to your ~/.bashrc file. Basically adds pyenv to PATH and initializes pyenv

export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
if command -v pyenv 1>/dev/null 2>&1; then
 eval "$(pyenv init -)"
fi
eval "$(pyenv init -)"

Step 4: Update your current shell environment

source ~/.bashrc

Step 5: Install python
Install any python version you want using the following command. Replace the version number with the version you want to install.

pyenv install 3.6.9

Step 6: Setting global and local python versions

pyenv global 3.6.9

This command will set the global python version to 3.6.9 to set local python version use:

pyenv local 3.6.9

Use pyenv versions command to list all versions of python you have installed!

Done!