Problem
How to install Python 3.3 on CentOS
tl;dr
wget http://python.org/ftp/python/3.3.5/Python-3.3.5.tar.xz tar xf Python-3.3.5.tar.xz cd Python-3.3.5 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath /usr/local/lib" make && make altinstall
Solution
The steps to install Python 3.3 are very similar to those for Python 2.7. Python requires development tools to be installed first:
yum groupinstall development
If you are to use Python in any serious capacity, there are a number of extremely useful development modules that should be installed before Python, so the interpreter can recognize and load them during the installation.
yum install zlib-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel sqlite-devel readline-devel tk-devel gdbm-devel db4-devel libpcap-devel xz-devel -y
Download the required installer:
wget http://python.org/ftp/python/3.3.5/Python-3.3.5.tar.xz
Uncompress the installer:
tar xf Python-3.3.5.tar.xz cd Python-3.3.5
Finally, run the install:
./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath /usr/local/lib" make && make altinstall
This will take about 5-10 minutes, after which Python 3.3 will be ready to use on your system.