How to install pypy3 on the Raspberry Pi

This post shows you an easy way of getting pypy3 running on the Raspberry Pi. I used Raspbian Buster on a Raspberry Pi 3 for this example. On Raspbian buster this will install pypy3 7.x!

First install pypy3 and virtualenv:

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y install pypy3 pypy3-dev virtualenv

Now we can create a virtualenv to install pypy packages into:

virtualenv -p /usr/bin/pypy3 ~/pypy3-virtualenv

Now we can activate the virtualenv. You need to do this every time you want to use pypy, for each shell / SSH connection separately:

source ~/pypy3-virtualenv/bin/activate

If your shell prompt is now prefixed by (pypy3-virtualenv) you have successfully activated the virtualenv:

(pypy3-virtualenv) uli@raspberrypi:~ $

Now python points to pypy3 and pip will install packages locally to ~/pypy3-virtualenv.

Now you can use e.g.

python3 myscript.py

to run your script (both python and python3 will point to pypy3 if you activated the virtual environment!).

Note: Installing pypy3-dev is not strictly neccessary to get pypy3 running, but you need it in order to compile native librarie like numpy.