Managing Python on macOS Big Sur

When Apple releases a new version of macOS it always takes a few months for everything to catchup, following my last blog post where I mentioned that I was having problems installing Python on macOS Big Sur↗which meant that my preferred method of installing and managing Python using pyenv, which is documented in this blog post↗, didn’t work out of the box — and the workarounds suggested workarounds on GitHub made my shell really slow.

Luckily, I noticed that there was an update to both Python↗ andpyenv when I ran brew update today so decided to give pyenv another try, and it worked as expected.

First I manually installed some prerequisites suggested on various GitHub issues, just to be on the safe side:

``` terminfo
brew install zlib sqlite bzip2 libiconv libzip

Next up you can either install or upgrade to the latest version of `pyenv`, which during writing is `1.2.22`:

```bash frame="terminal" title="Install pyenv"
``` terminfo
brew install pyenv

If like me, you need to upgrade, then you can run:

```bash frame="terminal" title="Upgrade pyenv"
``` terminfo
brew upgrade pyenv

Once the latest version `pyenv` has been installed, run the following commands to install the latest stable version of Python, which is currently 3.9.1:

```bash frame="terminal" title="Install Python 3.9.1 using pyenv"
``` terminfo
pyenv install 3.9.1
pyenv global 3.9.1
pyenv version

Once installed, run the following command to make sure that the `pyenv` managed version of Python is picked up:

<InfoCallout title="Info">
**Update: 11/06/2021;** the command below has been updated to include a change to how the "pyenv init" command works.
</InfoCallout>

```bash frame="terminal" title="Make sure the pyenv version is used"
``` terminfo
echo -e $'if command -v pyenv 1>/dev/null 2>&1; then\\n  export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"\\n  export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"\\n  eval "$(pyenv init --path)"\\n  eval "$(pyenv init -)"\\nfi' >> ~/.zshrc

Open a new shell and run:

```bash frame="terminal" title="Check the python version"
``` terminfo
python --version
which python

This should return something like the following:

```bash frame="terminal" title="Output of the commands"
$ python --version
Python 3.9.1
$ which python
/Users/russ.mckendrick/.pyenv/shims/python

The final step is to make sure that pip is up-to-date, to do this run:

``` terminfo
pip install --upgrade pip

This fixed a few issues I had when I ran:

```bash frame="terminal" title="Install Ansible"
``` terminfo
pip install --user ansible

Which meant that I didn't need to use [my custom container anymore](/2020/12/28/ansible-azure-and-macos-big-sur/).

Managing Python on macOS Big Sur

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