We deploy on Ubuntu 14.04, the most recent Long Term Support release. It comes with Python 2.7.6, but we need Python 2.7.9+ to get the some important SSL fixes and work with a recent version of the Requests library.

Felix Krull maintains a Personal Package Archive for Python 2.7 Updates, which makes it straight­for­ward to upgrade to Python 2.7.11 on supported versions of Ubuntu.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:fkrull/deadsnakes-python2.7
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python2.7 python2.7-dev

Be sure not to use Felix Krull’s other Python PPA by mistake. I did that on a colleague’s machine yesterday. In our attempts to figure out why we still had Python 2.7.6, we managed to mess up the machine suf­fi­cient­ly that we had to reinstall Ubuntu.