Successfully building a statically-linked version of Python depends greatly on the environment in which you are trying to build it and is really beyond the scope of this bug tracker. You don't say on which OS platform and version you are attempting this so it is hard to give any meaningful suggestions other than to make sure you have installed development versions (those including header files) of the various third-party libraries Python builds depend on (like libssl and libcrypto from OpenSSL), if your platform has a package manager, or build the required third-party libraries yourself. In any case, you will probably need to further edit the Setup file to reflect the location of the various third-party headers and libraries. As a rule, we don't do a lot of testing of static builds using Setup directly but some of the downstream distributors of Python do. Also note that Python 3.7 is now in the security-fix-only phase of its lifecycle prior to end-of-life in 2023, so further changes to the build process in 3.7 at this point would be out-of-scope. For what it's worth, there has been a significant amount of work in this area that is going into the next Python feature release, 3.11.0, planned for later this year so it should be significantly easier to do static builds and the like in 3.11. If you still run into problems with 3.7, suggest you ask in help forums like StackOverflow.  Good luck!