Compiling C Programs

You can't use apt or similar package managers to install programs on PythonAnywhere, because you do not have root access to the machine where your code runs -- in particular, you can't use the sudo command.

However, if you want to install a Linux tool that is written in C into your home directory, it's often possible.

Specifically, if the tool that you want to install has instructions on how to compile it from source, and the steps documented by the tool to do that are:

• Get the source (either by downloading it from a link and using tar to unpack it, or by using git clone
• cd into the source directory
• Run ./configure
• Run make
• Run sudo make install

...then you can often get it to work by following those steps, but adding the flag --prefix=/home/$HOME/.local to the ./configure line, and then missing out the sudo on the install line.