Note: If there are patches for the software you want available in the ports tree, you probably want to look at the working with ports page. However, if you want to customize your build further read on.

At the time of this writing I am in the process of building python 3.6.4. The build process could change in the future, but this is current build process, hopefully this will give someone the jumpstart they need to get going on this. It took me quite a while to find this infomation, not sure if I was going about the search in the wrong manner. Anyhow, without further ado…

You’ll first need the following…

Library dependencies

• archivers/bzip2
• archivers/xz
• databases/sqlite3
• devel/gettext
• devel/libffi

Build dependencies

• devel/autoconf/2.69
• devel/metaauto

Next pull down the python source code, following by in my case the necessary patches thank you to the maintainers for keeping this going and making things very easy on me. Finally apply the patches and build python

Note: I ended up running into some issues later on, I wanted to run this from my home directory. However this ended up causing issues when trying to create a virtualenv. I found this answer on stackoverflow which explained that when running the config you should tell the path you are planning to install to. Example:

./configure --prefix=/home/install/python

Hope this helps some people save some time and headaches.