Install and use Python 3.9 in your Synology

One of the advantages of installing python in your Synology is that you can write and schedule python scripts.

In this post I will show you how to get python 3.9 running, but in a future post I will show you how to schedule it.

Enable Home for all users

First, lets enable home for all users. That is where your python scripts will reside.

Enable SSH

I recommend you to disable SSH when you are done because it disables 2 factor auth and makes your synology more vulnerable.

Go to Control Panel > Terminal & SNMP > Terminal tab:

1. Check “Enable SSH service”
2. Click “Apply”

Run SSH

Before we run SSH, we need to know the IP of the server:

So now Press the windows icon and type cmd to start the cmd prompt and type:

username is your admin username.

ssh username@192.168.1.xx

Enter your admin password and you are in!

Upgrade Python

All synologies come with python 2 pre-install, but we want to use python 3. Lets upgrade it from the package center:

You will find your python 3.9 here:

/volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/bin/python3.9

If you look in the site-packages directory, you will see it is empty:

ls /volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages

so we need to install pip.

Either add the python3.9 to PATH or specify it when installing.

Sudo makes it available for all users. Your choice.

sudo /volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/bin/python3.9 -m ensurepip

Check if it has been installed:

ls /volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages

You should see pip there:

Update the pip, setuptools and wheel packages:

sudo /volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/bin/python3.9 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

And now install virtual environment:

sudo /volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/bin/python3.9 -m pip install virtualenv

and verify it is there:

ls /volume1/\@appstore/Python3.9/usr/lib/python3.9/site-packages

Now we are going to create a folder on our home directory

mkdir el_tracker

If you now navigate to your Home folder, you will see the folder there:

Navigate to the folder:

cd el_tracker

and create the virtual environment:

Note: elenv is the name of our virtual environment.

python3 -m venv elenv

And now you can activate it:

source elenv/bin/activate

Now that we are inside the environment we can install the packages we need.

The easiest way to get this done is to create a requirements.txt file and save it on your el_tracker project folder.

This is how the file looks like:

To get all those packages installed at once:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Now you installed everything:

1. Close the cmd window
2. Disable SSH
3. Make sure 2FA is still enabled

and happy python coding!

Coming next….

On my next post I will show you how to schedule your python script on your NAS.

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