While macOS ships with Python 2 by default, you can install set Python 3 as the default Python version on your Mac.
First, you install Python 3 with Homebrew.
brew update && brew install python
To make this new version your default, you can add the following line to your ~/.zshrc file (or ~/.bashrc if you want to expose it in bash instead of zsh).
alias python=/usr/local/bin/python3
Then open a new Terminal and Python 3 should be running.
Let's verify this is true.
python --version # e.g. Python 3.8.5
python3 path?Homebrew provides info about any installed "bottle" via the info command.
brew info python
# python@3.8: stable 3.8.5 (bottled)
# Interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language
# https://www.python.org/
# /usr/local/Cellar/python@3.8/3.8.5 (4,372 files, 67.7MB) *
# ...
And you can find the path we're looking for grep.
brew info python | grep bin
# /usr/local/bin/python3
# /usr/local/opt/python@3.8/libexec/bin
You can also symlink python3 to python.
ln -sf /usr/local/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python
In case your /usr/local/bin/python3 is also symlinked, you can check where it's symlinked to with:
readlink /usr/local/bin/python3
In my case, it returns ../Cellar/python@3.9/3.9.1_6/bin/python3.
Your system's Python 2.7 is still there.
/usr/bin/python --version # e.g Python 2.7.16
You can also use Homebrew's Python 2.
brew install python@2
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