PyPy is distributed as a precompiled binary that can be downloaded from http://pypy.org/download.html, and it currently supports Python versions 2.7 (beta support in PyPy 5.6) and 3.3 (alpha support in PyPy 5.5). In this chapter, we will demonstrate the usage of the 2.7 version.

Once PyPy is downloaded and unpacked, you can locate the interpreter in the bin/pypy directory relative to the unpacked archive. You can initialize a new virtual environment where we can install additional packages using the following command:

$ /path/to/bin/pypy -m ensurepip
$ /path/to/bin/pypy -m pip install virtualenv
$ /path/to/bin/virtualenv my-pypy-env

To activate the environment, we will use the following command:

$ source my-pypy-env/bin/activate

At this point, you can verify that the binary Python is linked to the PyPy executable by typing python -V. At this point, we can go ahead and install some packages we may need. As of version 5.6, PyPy has limited support for software that uses the Python C API (most notably, packages such as numpy and matplotlib). We can go ahead and install them in the usual way:

(my-pypy-env) $ pip install numpy matplotlib