MacOS Catalina (released in 2019) still does not have Python 3 installed by default, only Python 2. Therefore, I needed a way to package the whole application into an app bundle and not make it dependent on user’s Python installation. There are several tools that help with that: py2app, briefcase, pyinstaller. I decided to use PyInstaller, it. Doing it Right¶. Let’s install a real version of Python. Before installing Python, you’ll need to install GCC. GCC can be obtained by downloading Xcode, the smaller Command Line Tools (must have an Apple account) or the even smaller OSX-GCC-Installer package.
Maria Campbell provides a post on installing the latest version of Python on Mac OS Catalina and overriding the old default pre-installed version. And it even uses Homebrew and not some gnarly steps.
I finally did it. I successfully installed Python version 3.7.7 via Homebrew on my Maclaptop with OS Catalinainstalled.
Python Version Macos Catalina
For those of you that still might be trying to figure out how to do this, I will walk you through.
The reason why I was eager to make sure that I had the latest version installed was because I am working on publishing (open-source) teaching-related documentation on Read The Docs, and I need to have Python installed in order to be able to install the programs necessary to publish there.
The default 2.7.17 version of Python was retired this past January 2020. I had tried back then to replace it with Python 3+, but was unsuccessful at the time.
Python For Mac Os Catalina Free
They key appears to be also adding the following at the bottom of the .zshrc file to update the path to the newly installed version of Python via Homebrew:
Python Idle Macos Catalina
See all the steps in the blog post here and podcast here.