Install WSL on Windows

If not already installed, create a WSL environment on your Windows development workstation. This process is well documented by Microsoft so I'll just provide a link to their WSL pages here.

Install pyenv

By default, the WSL environment probably has the latest/greatest version of Python installed. Since we want to develop using Python 3.10, we'll accomplish this by installing pyenv, which enables us to switch between Python versions as needed.

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Thanks to Koki for posting the correct commands for this section on their blog.

Install packages required by penv

At a WSL command line, run the following apt install command:

sudo apt install -y gcc make build-essential libssl-dev libffi-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncurses5-dev xz-utils tk-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev liblzma-dev

Install pyenv

Next install the pyenv package:

curl https://pyenv.run | bash

Add pyenv to the WSL environment

Within the wsl command line, add the following lines to your .bashrc file (I use nano):

export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"

Either close and re-open your terminal window or use source ~/.bashrc to reload settings.

Install Python 3.10.0 using pyenv

With pyenv installed, enter the following command to use pyenv to download and install a local installation of Python 3.10.0:

pyenv install 3.10.0

Setting Python 3.10.0

penv can set Python 3.10.0 as the global version of python, or as the version only within a current directory:

pyenv global 3.10.0  # Set 3.10.0 as the default version of Python
pyenv local 3.10.0   # Set 3.10.0 as the version when running within the current folder