Install Python 2.7 on RHEL 6 - nscendoni/tutorials GitHub Wiki

Python 2.7 is not available in RHEL6. To install it make these steps:

1. Confgure yum if it was not configured:

    		cat /tmp/xauth |xargs -l xauth add  
    		cat <<EOF >>/etc/yum.repos.d/centos.repo
    		[centos]
    		name=centos
    		baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org/centos-6/6/os/x86_64
    		EOF
   
    		yum makecache
   

2. Install development tools

    		yum groupinstall "Development tools" 
    		yum install zlib-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel sqlite-devel readline-devel tk-devel gdbm-devel db4-devel libpcap-devel xz-devel wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.6/Python-2.7.6.tar.xz 
   

3. Download and compile: tar xf Python-2.7.6.tar.xz cd Python-2.7.6 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-unicode=ucs4 --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath /usr/local/lib" make && make altinstall

4. Install pip wget https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/raw/bootstrap/ez_setup.py python2.7 ez_setup.py easy_install-2.7 pip

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27115526/how-to-get-python-2-7-into-the-system-path-on-redhat-6-5-linux