installing ipython on rhel7

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I'm a RHEL newbie. I'm used to a non-Linux Unix, which has a fundamentally different way of dealing with packages.

I want to install ipython for a user on a vanilla RHEL7 system with yum as the package manager.

"yum install python" was fairly straightforward, but given that I'm new to the OS and I don't completely understand what ipython is, I am stumped as to how to proceed.

"yum install ipython" obviously doesn't work and every possible solution seems to require the installation of something else that I don't know how to install in a reasonable manner.

I am trying to keep things as generic as possible so it will be obvious how to update/remove software in the future, so anything that can be done with yum, would be probably preferable.

Installation instructions refer to pip, which I don't have. I possibly need setuptools to run pip, but I can't figure out the appropriate way to get that either. Maybe I can get one or either by installation the EPEL bundle of packages, but I can't find those for RHEL7, at least not in a way that doesn't seem like a "download and install this random file, trust us" method, which seems irresponsible.

Another option is anaconda. Again, there doesn't seem to be a yum-related way to install this, and anaconda itself is only a means to an end to download ipython, so that'd be two levels of abstraction away from the goal.

Additionally, do I even want "ipython" these days, or do I want "jupyter"?

All I care about is that the user should be able to type in "ipython" at the prompt and get the thing he is expecting.

Also, the python installed by yum is 2.7.5-48.el7, which does not seem to be current. I don't care about using the current version unless that prevents me from successfully installing ipython in some other manner, but I thought it might be relevant.

Any suggestions for how to install this thing is the most easily maintainable way? Do I not want the yum version of python?

Thanks for your patience.

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Install python-pip from EPEL repository first ( https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL - it's compatible with all Red Hat entrprise Linux distros - be it CentOS, RHEL, Oracl, ScientificLinux or whatever), (or if you don't trust EPEL repo providers you can use get-pip.py ( https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py ) script, but then you have to trust its providers instead) then install via

pip install ipython