How to set up python on your computer

There are many ways to install Python. You can ask three people about this topic and you will get five different opinions. My opinionated recommendation is to use pyenv to install and manage multiple Python versions and its companion pyenv-virtualenv to manage virtual environments.

If you are a macOS user like me, you should use Homebrew to install it.

brew update
brew install pyenv pyenv-virtualenv

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then, we append these lines at the end of the ~/.zshrc file:

# pyenv config
export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"
eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"

Usage Link to heading

First, we list all Python versions available to pyenv on the current system:

pyenv versions

Then, we list all available versions:

pyenv install --list

To create a virtual environment, you can execute a similar command:

pyenv virtualenv 3.11.4 arxiv-3.11.4

This will create a virtualenv based on Python 3.11.4 under $(pyenv root)/versions in a folder called arxiv-3.11.4.

If you want to automatically activate a specific virtual environment once you access a specific directory, you can execute pyenv local arxiv-3.11.4 inside that directory. This will create a .python-version which indicates the virtual environment to activate.