RHEL/CentOS 5.x has long since lost its freshness, but some of us are still running servers with it, and can do so for several more years before its end of life.
Perhaps, like me, you have a need to run a more modern version of Python than 5.x installs by default. I recently found pyenv, and it looked to fit my needs perfectly, as I didn’t want to mess with the system version or build custom RPM’s.
Once I installed the build requirements, I used the handy pyenv-installer project to get it up and running, then ran the simple command to install Python 2.7.8. Unfortunately, things hit a bump with this error:
Error message:
subprocess.CalledProcessError: Command '['wget', 'https://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-7.0.zip', '--quiet', '--output-document', '/tmp/python-build.20141210170309.3741/Python-2.7.8/setuptools-7.0.zip']' returned non-zero exit status 1
After a bit of digging, I found that this was actually due to a bug in version 1.11 of wget. As far as I could tell, this issue was not fixed upstream until the 1.12 release, and CentOS 5.x is frozen at 1.11.
I decided it was worth building a custom wget RPM package for my 5.x servers to get past this issue. After setting up my RPM build environment, I headed over to rpm.pbone.net to locate a suitable source RPM. wget-1.12-4.fc14.src.rpm ended up suiting my needs – the newer versions of wget RPMs had some build dependencies that were a bit awkward to fulfill, and 1.12 would solve my problem, so…
Per http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/RebuildSRPM, the –nomd5 switch is needed when installing newer fedora source RPMs:
rpm --nomd5 -ivv wget-1.12-4.fc14.src.rpm
From there it was simply a matter of building the RPM:
cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS
rpmbuild -bb wget.spec
Then installing it, by finding the wget-1.12-4 RPM file in one of the subdirectories of /usr/src/redhat/RPMS, changing to that directory, and running:
yum --nogpgcheck localinstall wget-1.14-3.x86_64.rpm
After this, pyenv install [version] should work as advertized…Python for the modern age!