python install without pip on ubuntu

I ran into a similar issue and wanted to give an alternative solution.

On Ubuntu 20.04 build-essential and python3-dev are recommended packages for python3-pip, therefore you can use the --no-install-recommends option to skip them:

RUN apt update -y && \
    apt install python3 python3-pip --no-install-recommends -y && \
    apt clean

This took my image from 420MB to 165MB, and obviously the build time was also quicker.

Note: this will work fine for pure-Python packages, but you will likely need build-essential and python3-dev if you want to compile anything

Useful links

  • https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/python3-pip
  • https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man8/apt-get.8.html

The Debian and Ubuntu package for PyYAML is called python-yaml, not python-pyyaml.

sudo apt install python-yaml

or

sudo apt install python3-yaml

respectively.

(It seems to be common in Debian/Ubuntu package names to drop any additional "py" prefix that a Python package might have: it's apt install python-tz instead of python-pytz, too. They don't seem to like the py-redundancy.)