Things like conda make setting up complex python projects simpler, but create a whole parallel world. Sometime you want to just fix the current OS, and at most use virtualenvs (I dislike introducing too many layers). I have a debian jessie (8.1) VM (oldstable), and I wanted to have modern python 3 on it, so I decided to install the latest python (3.7.3). Install dependencies sudo apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libbz2-dev It turns out that the shipped openssl is too old to build the ssl module, so it is better to get the latest stable openssl and install it (I did it in my home):