Python

What it is

Python is a programming language for scripts, tools and web applications. A program is run by the Python interpreter, and pip installs the libraries it uses. These packages bring the interpreter, pip and the standard library, with OpenSSL, SQLite and the other libraries they need built in.

History

Guido van Rossum created Python in the early 1990s at CWI in the Netherlands, as a successor to a language called ABC. Python 2.0 came out in 2000, and in 2001 the Python Software Foundation was formed to hold Python's intellectual property. Python 2 reached its end of life in 2020: 2.7.18, released on 20 April 2020, was its last release.

Sources: Python documentation: History and License; PEP 373: Python 2.7 Release Schedule

What Nextweb does with it

Nextweb installs Python into its runtime folder, as nextweb_server/runtime/python3.14.9-linux-x64 for the command above. Run bin/python3 from there. The folder can be copied anywhere and still runs. Each runtime brings pip, and bin/python3 -m venv makes an environment with pip 26.2.2.

Nextweb does not deploy Python applications yet. deploy runs Node.js applications and WordPress.

Before you start

It runs on Linux x64 with glibc 2.31 or later. Each version is tested on Debian 11, 12 and 13, Ubuntu 20.04, 22.04, 24.04 and 26.04, AlmaLinux 9 and 10, Amazon Linux 2023 and Fedora 42. OpenSSL, SQLite, libffi, zlib, bzip2, xz and zstd are built in, so the machine needs nothing but its C library.

For TLS it reads the machine's certificates, from /etc/ssl/cert.pem or /etc/ssl/certs, or the ones SSL_CERT_FILE and SSL_CERT_DIR name. It does not read the machine's OpenSSL configuration file. A minimal container image has no certificates until its ca-certificates package is installed.

Left out: tkinter, curses, GNU readline (the interactive prompt has no line editing or history), dbm and gdbm. Python 3.12.15 also leaves out crypt and nis.

Which version

Python 3.14.9 is the current 3.14 release, from 21 October 2026. Python 3.15 has no package yet. Python 3.13.17 and 3.12.15 are for applications that need those versions: pkg install python3.13.17-linux-x64 or pkg install python3.12.15-linux-x64. Python ships 3.12.15 with pip 25.0.1, which carries a certificate bundle older than 19 October 2026; this package replaces it with pip 26.2.2, so its environments get the newer bundle too.

Python 2.7.18 is for an application that cannot move to Python 3 yet: pkg install python2.7.18-linux-x64. Python stopped fixing 2.7 on 1 January 2020, and 2.7.18, in April 2020, was its last release. Bugs found since are not fixed in this package, among them CVE-2021-3177 in ctypes, CVE-2021-23336 in query-string parsing and CVE-2022-0391 in URL parsing. Its OpenSSL is 1.1.1w, which has had no public fixes since September 2023, and its pip is 20.3.4, the last for Python 2, with a certificate bundle from November 2020. It ships bin/python and bin/python2, never bin/python3. Move the application to Python 3 as soon as you can.

Versions

Published is the date the file was uploaded to Nextweb's download server.