How to Quickly Set Up a Python Development Environment on CentOS

After obtaining a clean CentOS system, this guide records the commands and issues for initializing a Python environment; it can be scripted or containerized with Docker.

1. Create a New User

sudo adduser newuser
sudo passwd newuser

Configure Passwordless Sudo

sudo /usr/sbin/visudo
newuser    ALL=NOPASSWD: ALL

2. Enable EPEL Repository

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh epel-release-6*.rpm

3. Add IUS Repository

wget http://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/CentOS/6/x86_64/ius-release-1.0-13.ius.centos6.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -Uvh ius-release-1.0-13.ius.centos6.noarch.rpm

4. Install Python 2.7, Python 3, and pip

sudo yum install python27
sudo yum install python27-devel

curl https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/raw/bootstrap/ez_setup.py | sudo /usr/bin/python2.7 -

pip

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | sudo /usr/bin/python2.7 -
sudo yum install python34u python34u-devel

5. Install virtualenv

sudo pip install virtualenv

6. Generate SSH Key

ssh-keygen -t rsa

# Add ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to Git or GitHub

Additional Services

Install Git

sudo yum install git

Install MySQL

sudo yum install mysql
sudo yum install mysql-devel* -y
sudo yum install mysql-server
sudo /sbin/service mysqld start

Install Redis

sudo yum install redis

Install RabbitMQ

sudo yum install rabbitmq-server

Troubleshooting

When encountering [Errno 14] Peer cert cannot be verified or peer cert invalid, add sslverify=false to /etc/yum.conf. For pip errors like ImportError: cannot import name HTTPSHandler, install OpenSSL development packages: yum install openssl openssl-devel -y MySQL‑python compilation may fail with gcc errors; ensure the MySQL development headers are installed:

yum install mysql-devel