Upgrade Python to latest version (3.10) on Ubuntu Linux
Last Updated: 2022-03-03
Linux systems come with Python install by default, but, they are usually not the latest. Python also cannot be updated by a typical apt upgrade
command as well.
To check the version of Python installed on your system run
python3 --version
python
keyword is used for Python 2.x versions which has been deprecated
In this guide we will
- Update Python to the latest version
- Fix pip & other Python related issues
- While doing the above two, ensure your Ubuntu which is heavily dependent on Python does not break
Updating Python to the latest version
Ubuntu's default repositories do not contain the latest version of Python, but an open source repository named deadsnakes
does.
Python3.10 is not officially available on Ubuntu 20.04, ensure you backup your system before upgrading.
Step 1: Check if Python3.10 is available for install
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
sudo apt update
Check if Python 3.10 is available by running
apt list | grep python3.10
This will produce the below result, if you see python3.10 it means you can install it
Step 2: Install Python 3.10
Now you can install Python 3.10 by running
sudo apt install python3.10
Now though Python 3.10 is installed, if you check the version of your python by running python3 --version
you will still see an older version. This is because you have two versions of Python installed and you need to choose Python 3.10 as the default.
Step 3: Set Python 3.10 as default
Steps beyond here are tested on Ubuntu 20.04 in VM & WSL2, but are experimental , proceed at your own risk.
Changing the default alternatives for Python will break your Gnome terminal. To avoid this, you need to edit the gnome-terminal
configuration file.
Open the terminal and run:
sudo nano /usr/bin/gnome-terminal
In first line, change #!/usr/bin/python3
to #!/usr/bin/python3.8
. Press Ctrl +X
followed by enter
to save and exit.
Then save and close the file.
Next, update the default Python by adding both versions to an alternatives by running the below
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python3 python3 /usr/bin/python3.9 1
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python3 python3 /usr/bin/python3.10 2
Now run
sudo update-alternatives --config python3
Choose the selection corresponding to Python3.10 (if not selected by default).
Now run python3 --version
again and you should see the latest Python as the output.
Fix pip and disutils errors
Installing the new version of Python will break pip
as the distutils
for Python3.10 is not installed yet.
Fix Python3-apt
Running pip
in terminal will not work, as the current pip is not compatible with Python3.10 and python3-apt will be broken, that will generate an error like
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/command-not-found", line 28, in <module>
from CommandNotFound import CommandNotFound
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/CommandNotFound/CommandNotFound.py", line 19, in <module>
from CommandNotFound.db.db import SqliteDatabase
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/CommandNotFound/db/db.py", line 5, in <module>
import apt_pkg ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'apt_pkg'
To fix this first remove the current version of python3-apt by running
sudo apt remove --purge python3-apt
Then do some cleanup
sudo apt autoclean
DO NOT RUN sudo apt autoremove
as it will remove several packages that are required. This may break your system if you're using GUI, if you're on WSL2 you can proceed.
Finally, reinstall python3-apt
by running
sudo apt install python3-apt
Install pip & distutils
Running pip
will still throw an error pip: command not found
. We need to install the latest version of pip compatible with Python 3.10.
Also, if try to manually install the latest version of pip, it will throw an error like
ImportError: cannot import name 'sysconfig' from 'distutils'
(/usr/lib/python3.10/distutils/__init__.py)
Or you might also see an error stating No module named 'distutils.util'
. This is because the distutils
module is not installed yet, to install run the below command
sudo apt install python3.10-distutils
Now you can install pip
by running
curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
sudo python3.10 get-pip.py
If you get an error like
bash: curl: command not found
then you need to install curl first by runningsudo apt install curl
Now you can run pip
and you should see the output of pip --version
Fix pip-env errors when using venv
When you try to create a new virtual environment using python -m venv env
, you may into the following error.
Error: Command '['/path/to/env/bin/python3', '-Im', 'ensurepip', '--upgrade', '--default-pip']' returned non-zero exit status 1
You can fix this by reinstalling venv by running
sudo apt install python3.10-venv
All should be done now. It is complicated, but this is how you update Python to latest version.