How to update Python on Mac
In this tutorial, we will discuss different ways to update Python on your Mac. We will also discuss how to install the latest version of Python 3 or Python 2 on your Mac.
While the easiest way to update or install the latest version of Python on your Mac is to use Python’s official website, we will have to check for future updates manually by repeatedly checking the site.
So, another way to update Python to the latest version is to use a single command. We can easily update Python on macOS using Homebrew.
Update Python on Mac using Homebrew
Homebrew is an open source package manager software for macOS and Linux. It helps in installing and updating software through the terminal.
Once we have Homebrew, we can easily install Python on macOS using the following command in the terminal.
brew install python3
We can also update Python 3 version from 3.x to 3.y using the following command on the terminal.
brew update && brew upgrade python
After installing Python 3, we can set the program to run by default using the following command.
cp /usr/local/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python
But the problem with the above method is that there will be problems running some legacy code with Python 2. Therefore, we can use an alias to point to the Python version installed by Homebrew to run Python scripts.
echo "alias python=/usr/local/bin/python3.7" >> ~/.bashrc
If we must run the program using Python 2, we can do so by specifying the default macOS Python binary path at the beginning of the code file /usr/bin/python/as shown below.
#!/usr/bin/python/
print("hello world!")
We can also install Python 2 on macOS using the following command.
brew install python@2
Update Python using the Python installer for macOS
Before updating or installing Python on Mac using Python installer, the first step is to check the version of Python installed on Mac. We can check the version of Python 2 and Python 3 installed on Mac using the following command.
For Python 2:
python --version
For Python 3:
python3 --version
After checking the version, the next step is to check if there is a new version available on the official website . We can download the installer and use Python Installer to update or install the required version.
We can confirm whether the new version of Python is installed successfully by checking the Python version using the above two commands.
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