General Information

• Website: https://www.python.org
• Source code: https://github.com/python/cpython
• Issue tracker: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues
• Documentation: https://docs.python.org
• Developer's Guide: https://devguide.python.org/

Contributing to CPython

For more complete instructions on contributing to CPython development, see the Developer Guide.

Using Python

Installable Python kits, and information about using Python, are available at python.org.

Build Instructions

On Unix, Linux, BSD, macOS, and Cygwin:

./configure
make
make test
sudo make install

This will install Python as python3.

You can pass many options to the configure script; run ./configure --help to find out more. On macOS case-insensitive file systems and on Cygwin, the executable is called python.exe; elsewhere it's just python.

Building a complete Python installation requires the use of various additional third-party libraries, depending on your build platform and configure options. Not all standard library modules are buildable or useable on all platforms. Refer to the Install dependencies section of the Developer Guide for current detailed information on dependencies for various Linux distributions and macOS.

On macOS, there are additional configure and build options related to macOS framework and universal builds. Refer to Mac/README.rst.

On Windows, see PCbuild/readme.txt.

If you wish, you can create a subdirectory and invoke configure from there. For example:

mkdir debug
cd debug
../configure --with-pydebug
make
make test

(This will fail if you also built at the top-level directory. You should do a make clean at the top-level first.)

To get an optimized build of Python, configure --enable-optimizations before you run make. This sets the default make targets up to enable Profile Guided Optimization (PGO) and may be used to auto-enable Link Time Optimization (LTO) on some platforms. For more details, see the sections below.

What's New

We have a comprehensive overview of the changes in the What's New in Python 3.11 document. For a more detailed change log, read Misc/NEWS, but a full accounting of changes can only be gleaned from the commit history.

If you want to install multiple versions of Python, see the section below entitled "Installing multiple versions".

Documentation

Documentation for Python 3.11 is online, updated daily.

It can also be downloaded in many formats for faster access. The documentation is downloadable in HTML, PDF, and reStructuredText formats; the latter version is primarily for documentation authors, translators, and people with special formatting requirements.

For information about building Python's documentation, refer to Doc/README.rst.

Converting From Python 2.x to 3.x

Significant backward incompatible changes were made for the release of Python 3.0, which may cause programs written for Python 2 to fail when run with Python 3. For more information about porting your code from Python 2 to Python 3, see the Porting HOWTO.

Testing

To test the interpreter, type make test in the top-level directory. The test set produces some output. You can generally ignore the messages about skipped tests due to optional features which can't be imported. If a message is printed about a failed test or a traceback or core dump is produced, something is wrong.

By default, tests are prevented from overusing resources like disk space and memory. To enable these tests, run make testall.

If any tests fail, you can re-run the failing test(s) in verbose mode. For example, if test_os and test_gdb failed, you can run:

make test TESTOPTS="-v test_os test_gdb"

If the failure persists and appears to be a problem with Python rather than your environment, you can file a bug report and include relevant output from that command to show the issue.

See Running & Writing Tests for more on running tests.

Installing multiple versions

On Unix and Mac systems if you intend to install multiple versions of Python using the same installation prefix (--prefix argument to the configure script) you must take care that your primary python executable is not overwritten by the installation of a different version. All files and directories installed using make altinstall contain the major and minor version and can thus live side-by-side. make install also creates ${prefix}/bin/python3 which refers to ${prefix}/bin/python3.X. If you intend to install multiple versions using the same prefix you must decide which version (if any) is your "primary" version. Install that version using make install. Install all other versions using make altinstall.

For example, if you want to install Python 2.7, 3.6, and 3.11 with 3.11 being the primary version, you would execute make install in your 3.11 build directory and make altinstall in the others.

Release Schedule

See PEP 664 for Python 3.11 release details.

Copyright and License Information

Copyright © 2001-2023 Python Software Foundation. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2000 BeOpen.com. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1995-2001 Corporation for National Research Initiatives. All rights reserved.

Copyright © 1991-1995 Stichting Mathematisch Centrum. All rights reserved.

See the LICENSE for information on the history of this software, terms & conditions for usage, and a DISCLAIMER OF ALL WARRANTIES.

This Python distribution contains no GNU General Public License (GPL) code, so it may be used in proprietary projects. There are interfaces to some GNU code but these are entirely optional.

All trademarks referenced herein are property of their respective holders.