For this post I am specifically working on Ubuntu 16.04 but I’m sure it could work on other versions as well, however a little while back I wrote another post about building python on docker.

In this post I’m going to look at creating a chroot environment and then setting that up to complete the build. To setup the chroot environment I am going to be following along with this community post Let’s get started by installing the necessary packages

$ sudo apt-get install -y schroot debootstrap

After that create a directory where the chroot will reside

$ sudo mkdir /var/xenial

Next edit the /etc/schroot/schroot.conf file (as sudo)for the new chroot environment

[xenial]
description=Ubuntu Xenial
location=/var/xenial
priority=3
users=your_username
groups=sbuild
root-groups=root

Next find a mirror site that works best from here and using that url run the following (where http://mirror.example.com/ubuntu/ is replaced by the appropriate url)

$ sudo debootstrap --variant=buildd --arch amd64 xenial /var/xenial/ http://mirror.example.com/ubuntu/

In order to have network connection copy the following into the chroot:

$ sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /var/xenial/etc/resolv.conf

Mount the /proc directory to manage processes:

$ sudo mount -o bind /proc /var/xenial/proc

Update the available sources list in the chroot environment

$ sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /var/xenial/etc/apt/sources.list

Finally get a root shell inside the chroot:

$ sudo chroot /var/xenial

Setting up the build environment

Now that a chroot environment is setup, it’s time to setup the build environment.

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential checkinstall
apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev libffi-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libbz2-dev wget

Getting the python source of the desired version

$ wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.0/Python-3.7.0b3.tar.xz

Next extract the source

$ tar vxf Python-3.7.0b3.tar.xz

Finally move into the python source directory, configure and build:

./configure
make
make test

Install and enjoy!