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Python

Posted by Maciej Badowski
Maciej Badowski
1,842 Points

MacOS users using Terminal to run scripts

I just came across very simple yet very annoying situation when trying to use external code editor (Brackets) and then running the script in Terminal (because MacOS has Python installed by default). Not many people will go THAT rogue in Python basics but in case somebody struggles with password_check.py I'd rather highlight it here.

When I was running script I got NameError which annoyed the hell out of me for a while. The reason is that default installed version of Python on MacOS is 2.7 and it doesn't automatically treat "input" as a string (it expects legacy call raw_input).

Solution is to install Python3 from official repository and use python3 instead of python to run your scripts.

Hope it helps!

1 Answer

Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,913 Points
Michael Hulet
Michael Hulet
47,913 Points

This is definitely good advice. The version of Python that ships with macOS is super old, like you said, and all the Treehouse videos are in Python 3, which is much newer. That being said, I've found it much easier to install Python with Homebrew than with the installer from the official website. This way, you just have to brew install python, and whenever you wanna update it, it's as simple as running brew update and then brew upgrade instead of having to download another GUI installer and overwrite your current installation that way. Package managers like Homebrew make software easier to maintain over time. I think you'll like it ?

Maciej Badowski
Maciej Badowski
1,842 Points

Thanks Michael, yes indeed homebrew makes life a bit easier in this matter on MacOS.

Additional advice is to make aliases for faster execution between both Python versions. What I did is basically ran: alias p2=python Then another command: alias p3=python3

Which effectively allows to run scripts faster with e.g.:

p2 script_name.py (for Python 2.7) or p3 script_name.py (for Python 3.x)

Instead of writing every time:

python script_name.py or python3 script_name.py