Package Manager

A package manager is a tool to automate the installation process of computer programs. Popular choices are Homebrew on Mac OS X, apt on Ubuntu and Chocolatey on Windows.

Homebrew (OS X)

Setup Homebrew

  1. Fire up the built-in Terminal application from your Mac, and paste the following command into it. (You can always use the search button located on the top left cornor on your Mac to find Terminal)

    ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

    Note that this might take a while, especially when installing Xcode Command Line tools.

  2. Then paste the following command into the same terminal window and press Enter.

    echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
  3. Close the current terminal window.

Use Homebrew

Open up another terminal window. Enter the following command and press Enter:

brew update

Which updates Homebrew itself, all the formulae it contains and install git onto your Mac.

Now, you can easily install Python 3 by brew install python3. However, due to some compatibility issues, it's the best that we use Python 3.4, instead of the latest version. To obtain and install the formula of Python 3.4, enter the following command into the terminal:

brew tap 20015jjw/python34
brew install python34
python3 --version

Since this is not an official formula, you will see an error. Let it be. In the end when all the command finishes (you might need to press Enter once more to execute the last command), you should see this line on the screen:

Wills-Mac-Pro:src Will$ python3 --version
Python 3.4.4

As you can see, Python 3.4.4 is installed on your Mac and can be accessed by typing python3 into a terminal window.

More Usage & Mac Setup

To setup your Mac OS X properly for development, you can consult this book by Sourabh. It covers many useful tips for setting up different kinds of development environment. You should definitely take a look at the Cask section under Chapter 3, as it allows you to install almost all the useful applications with a single line of code.

Chocolatey (Windows)

Install Chocolatey

  1. Open the start menu, enter cmd.exe and right-click on it to run it as administrator.

  2. Paste the following command into the command line window and press Enter (The line is really long, and right-click on the terminal to paste):

    @powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "iex ((new-object net.webclient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))" && SET PATH=%PATH%;%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\chocolatey\bin
  3. Restart the shell (Command Line Prompt, Gitbash or Cmder)

Use Chocolatey

Simply run the following command in a shell that runs as Administrator to install Python 3.4:

choco install python -v 3.4.3

Install Python with Choco