Portable PyPy distribution for Linux
Note: As of PyPy 7.3.0 the general direction and some patches from Portable PyPy were adapted/incorporated into upstream. For 7.3.0 and newer just go to official PyPy downloads page http://pypy.org/download.html and grab Linux x86-64 binary (64bit, built on CentOS6).
This repository contains efforts to build 64 bit x86 PyPy binaries for various Linux distributions. The idea is that you just download an archive, uncompress it and run it instantly without installing any extra libraries or tweaking your OS. Currently they are known to work across various DEB and RPM based distributions including RHEL/Centos 6 and later, Fedora, SuSE Linux, Ubuntu and Debian stable. PyPy binaries should run on any distribution that includes glibc 2.17.
Latest Python 3.6 release
md5: f5806dbee63e64bf51b6d8453183f133 sha1: fd675cc1d795f19893ed1d026a34307e0b6b0be0 sha256: 59099546b4dee56edcde2c9ff706687e35bb2aa94354cd56daa78aca036bd3d8
Latest Python 2.7 release
md5: cc8c7fb3553727476b204d1cd00eaef5 sha1: 21101a1ab2a8659f699ea60613cc867e7292f55d sha256: a4f301e7629aafe4691ed1c3e9a39cf2158d86524f6ce584e5b850303e77ad81
All older downloads (pre 7.2) can be found here. The original mercurial repository was archived here.
Using virtualenv
For your convenience this build also includes packaged virtualenv so you don't have to install one if you haven't done it yet:
portable-pypy/bin/virtualenv-pypy my-environment
In this case you don't have to add -p switch as it defaults to pypy binary
located in the build.
Stock virtualenv didn't work with portable binaries prior to version 2.3 that included RPATH
entries in pypy binary. For these versions it's obligatory to use
virtualenv-pypy that fixes this problem.
Included software
Besides PyPy there is OpenSSL, SQLite3, libffi, expat, TCL/TK and virtualenv packaged in these builds.
A word about OpenSSL
This software bundles OpenSSL. Each build has a version of OpenSSL that was most recent and stable at the time of packaging this software. This is done because OpenSSL versions used across distrubtions in last 10 years greately vary and they are not compatible in ABI nor API way. This also means that if there is a major security issue with OpenSSL updating your system OpenSSL will not solve it for Portable PyPy. If you are looking for tight integration with your distribution you should probably wait until your distribution vendor packages version of PyPy you want to use or you can notify me and wait for a new build.
The ssl module will try to locate and use your system certificate store. Namely it will look for a /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt file (RHEL derived systems) and then look for a /etc/ssl/certs directory (Debian dervied systems). Finally it will fallback to bundled Mozilla trust stores extraced from certifi project. If you don't like this behavior or your system trust store is located somewhere else you can use SSL_CERT_FILE and SSL_CERT_DIR environment variables to point it somewhere else.
How it is done
Binaries are built with a CentOS 6 base image with help of docker. That ensures that they are built against version of GLIBC that is reasonably old not to cause problems with symbol versioning. All the dependencies are also built inside chroot from latest stable tarballs. They are packed together with PyPy into one distribution and RPATH entries are inserted into them (this ensures that they can be found relatively to each other).
If you want to build it yourself checkout instructions inside BUILD.rst.