Raspberry Pi - Upgrading to Python 3.6

Before installing python 3.6 there are some dependencies that need to be installed.

sudo apt-get install -y build-essential tk-dev libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev libreadline6-dev libdb5.3-dev libgdbm-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev libexpat1-dev liblzma-dev zlib1g-dev libffi-dev libreadline-gplv2-dev libc6-dev 

Download and install Python:

$ wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.6.9/Python-3.6.9.tgz
$ tar xzvf Python-3.6.9.tgz
$ cd Python-3.6.9
$ ./configure && make && sudo make install

It will take a while to complete on a Raspberry Pi 3. Before re-compiling do a make clean to avoid errors from previous builds:

# make clean

(*) If errors occur with https:// not working with pip, make sure openssl is installed

$ dpkg -l | grep ssl

Installing pip

$ python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade pip

Check pip version

$ python3 -m pip --version

Installing virtual environment package

$ python3 -m pip install --user virtualenv

Create a virtual environment

$ python3 -m venv venv_name

Activate virtual environment

$ source venv_name/bin/activate

Deactivate virtual environment

$ deactivate

Install requests python package

pip3 install requests

Freezing pip dependencies

pip freeze

Using a file to control dependencies create a requirements.txt file containing:

requests==2.18.4
google-auth==1.1.0

And tell pip to install all of the packages in this file using the -r flag:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Upgrading packages with pip3

pip3 install --upgrade requests