You’ll be asked for an administrator password because the macOS Library is written to. It will install on your boot drive by default, but you’ll be given a chance to change the install location. Walk through the installer by reading the package notes and agree to the license terms. When you double-click this file, it will launch the package’s installer, and you’ll see this: Python’s Installer Package Welcome

That means everything from 10.6 Snow Leopard up to and including 10.13 Sierra.) (The 10.6 embedded in the file name means you need at least macOS Snow Leopard to run it. You’ll be downloading a macOS package file called “python-3.6.2-macosx10.6.pkg” to your downloads folder. You won’t have to delete any other version. If you’ve already downloaded a previous version of Python 3.x, the installer will create a new directory with new link called Python3.6. What do I Need to Know Before Installing? It’ll look like this: Python download page.

You’re probably wanting 3.6.2 (as of August 2017).

It should auto-detect that you’re on a Mac. Go to the Python website’s download page. It’s particularly easy to do because 1) There’s an macOS installer package that does all the work and 2) it includes a basic IDE, and 3) you can still run both versions, so there’s no penalty to installing 3.6.x. Secondly, if you want to use a specific third party package or utility that doesn’t yet have a released version that is compatible with Python 3, and porting that package is a non-trivial task, you may choose to use Python 2.7 in order to retain access to that package.Īlternatively, if you’re a newbie to the language and/or your class instructor insists that you begin by learning 3.x, then you’ll need to install it on your Mac. In the past, the site said:įirstly, if you’re deploying to an environment you don’t control, that may impose a specific version, rather than allowing you a free selection from the available versions. So should you ever be using 2.7? Not unless you absolutely have to and accept that you’ll have to rewrite your code at some point. Python 2 will reach end of life (EOL) in the year 2020. As a result, the 3.x version can’t be depended on to run 2.x scripts. To do this, backwards compatibility had to be compromised. Even macOS 10.13 High Sierra has Python 2.7.4 as its only version.Īs the Python website says, “ Python 2.x is legacy, Python 3.x is the present and future of the language.” Briefly, in order to move forward technically as a language, the creator, Guido van Rossum, needed to make some significant internal changes. Python 2.x is installed in macOS by default.

Updating python on mac