Why

Not all distro created equal.
Some are created to join the space race, some are to hold unto the leagcy, some are cutting-edge, some are cutting edge. Some are born to boot-up IoT devices some are to push out heavy graphics.

That’s the fun (albeit, power) of Linux.

CentOS 7 logo

CentOS 7 is a powerful and stable distro that runs on thousands (probably, millions) production-grade servers.
In the matter of stability, it’s a beast. However, it doesn’t ship with Python 3, by default. You can install it via EPEL repository, or the below simple steps.

Also, take a note. The Python 2 comes with the system, which is probably 2.7.5, do NOT mess with it. Many system components rely on that specific version. If you need the latest versions of 2, use virtualenv or pipenv.

Prepare your system

Start with installing pre-requisite utilities for compilation and development support.

$ sudo yum update && sudo yum groupinstall -y "development tools"  
$ sudo yum install -y zlib-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel \
       sqlite-devel readline-devel tk-devel gdbm-devel \
       db4-devel libpcap-devel xz-devel expat-devel

Download latest Python source code from Python.org

$ wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.6.6/Python-3.6.6.tar.xz
$ tar xf Python-3.6.6.tar.xz
$ cd Python-3.6.6

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath /usr/local/lib"  
$ ./configure --enable-optimizations

Build and install

$ make
$ sudo make altinstall

Now, Python 3.6.6 is ready to be used in your system; located in /usr/local/bin/python3.6 

$ which python3.6
/usr/local/bin/python3.6

$ python3.6
Python 3.6.6 (default, Jul 10 2018, 14:04:26)
[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-28)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

For convenience, you can create a symbolic-link with a shorter name. If you had system-installed Python3 (unlikely), don’t do this, as some system-components may depend on that specific older version of Python 3. 

$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/python3.6 /usr/local/bin/python3
$ python3
Python 3.6.6 (default, Jul 10 2018, 14:04:26)
[GCC 4.8.5 20150623 (Red Hat 4.8.5-28)] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>

Install wheel and pip

You don’t need to, because Python 3.6.6 includes these necessary tools included. 

$ pip3.6 -V
pip 10.0.1 from /usr/local/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pip (python 3.6)
$ wheel version
wheel 0.29.0