Published: Jan 2, 2019 by
This morning I was setting up a RHEL 7 box for development using my normal dot files, but when I was ready to sit down and start working on my project I noticed I got an error from You Complete Me letting me know that the version of vim that was installed wasn’t compatible. After checking EPEL for a more up to date install I decided to try pulling vim from source and building it myself.
Luckily this wasn’t too hard, but I did run into a small issue related to the vim .config –with-python* flags since I’m using conda as my Python environment manager. The short story is the vim needs some information from the Python config directory to enable python and python3 support. When you use Anaconda or Minionda to manage your environments these are in slightly different locations than the normal /usr or /lib64 paths you may find in vim build documentation. Instead they will be in your conda environment lib as seen below.
Install additional build dependencies.
sudo yum install cmake gcc-c++ make ncurses-devel
Clone vim source, configure and build. Specifically pay attention to the — with-python* flags and the config directory they use in your conda environment.
git clone https://github.com/vim/vim.gitpushd ~/vim/src./configure --with-features=huge \
--enable-multibyte \
--enable-rubyinterp=yes \
--enable-pythoninterp=yes \
--with-python-config-dir=/work/alex/miniconda3/envs/py27/lib/python2.7/config \
--enable-python3interp=yes \
--with-python3-config-dir=/work/alex/miniconda3/lib/python3.6/config-3.6m-x8664-linux-gnu \
--enable-perlinterp=yes \
--enable-luainterp=yes \
--enable-cscope \
--prefix=/home/alex/.local/vim | grep -i pythonmake && make installpopdFinally if you use a custom prefix as seen above (prevents system level changes and conflicts impacting others) you probably want to add the below to you .bashrc file.
if [ -d "$HOME/.local/vim/bin/" ] ; then
PATH="$HOME/.local/vim/bin/:$PATH"
fi
And that’s it. You should now have an up to date vim install with Python.