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I'm trying to install VIM with Python support on Linux without sudo, but for some reason VIM always gets installed without python ( -python in vim --version )

  1. I first installed Python locally by downloading the tgz file and decompressing it in $HOME

  2. Then I cd to that directory and ran: ./configure --prefix=$HOME/python && make && make install

I already got VIM installed without Python support, so I just went to the VIM source directory and ran the following:

  1. ./configure --prefix=$HOME --with-features=huge --enable-pythoninterp --without-x --with-python-config-dir=/home/<user>/python/lib/python2.7/config

  2. make && make install

VIM so far still shows -python and echo has('python') returns 0

The <vim-src>/src/auto/config.log file shows that it's trying to use the system python:

configure:5486: checking for python
configure:5504: found /usr/bin/python 
.
.
configure:5740: result: no: PYTHON DISABLED

but fails and end up not adding python support!.

Am I doing something wrong here?

share|improve this question
    
Hi there, this may not directly related to your problem but I suggest you have a look at linuxbrew. It will allow you to install many software to your own home directory, vim, Emacs, pyenv, rbenv etc etc. –  Ask and Learn May 1 at 6:47
    
ruby is not installed on the machine I'm using, and I can't install it since I don't have sudo :( –  Yohanna May 4 at 14:49
    
You can install linuxbrew by git git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/linuxbrew.git ~/.linuxbrew but it does need some development libraries and tools to build other software. Anyway, I still suggest you give it a go. –  Ask and Learn May 5 at 0:28

2 Answers 2

up vote 0 down vote

Check the output of vim ./configure and the files it generated (./src/auto/config.h, ./src/auto/config.status) for the Python support.

Also make sure you're executing the right vim binary.

share|improve this answer
    
Thanks spuk, the ./configure output actually shows it was using the system python executable not the local version of python, I didn't notice this before. I've updated the question with extra details about the log output. –  Yohanna Jun 8 at 16:16
up vote 0 down vote accepted

Apparently ./configure was trying to use the system python executable in /usr/bin/python and since I wasn't running it with sudo, it was failing for some reason.

./configure looks in your $PATH for the python executable, so I had to add the local python bin dir to my $Path before the /usr/bin dir.

So adding something like this export PATH=$HOME/python/bin:$PATH in .bashrc made it work.

Note that the local python bin directory has to be before the /usr/bin/ dir in $PATH.

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