9

On Mac, if I simply open a new terminal window and run:

python --version

I get: 

3.6

but if I do this:

 virtualenv venv && source venv/bin/activate

and then, in that environment, I run :

python --version

I get: 

2.7

I need virtualenv to run 3.6. How do I do that?

This :

/usr/bin/python

is 2.7 but this:

/usr/local/bin/python

is 3.6. The path for my normal user has /usr/local/bin come up before /usr/bin/. Is virtualenv running as someone else? How do I control its path?

I ran this:

virtualenv -p /usr/local//Cellar/python/3.6.5/bin/python3 venv

but then I do this:

virtualenv venv && source venv/bin/activate

and I'm running in an environment with 2.7.

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2 Answers 2

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16

On Python 3 you don't need virtualenv script anymore, you should just use the venv module included with standard lib:

python3 -m venv myvenv

But if you really want to keep using the old virtualenv script, you can - specify the interpreter explicitly with the -p option:

virtualenv -p /path/to/python3 myvenv
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3 Comments

I tried this but it seems to have no effect: virtualenv -p /usr/local//Cellar/python/3.6.5/bin/python3 venv
What do you mean "no effect"? Describe the actual result and how it differs from expected result.
Because you ran virtualenv again afterward, undoing the previous venv and putting another 2.7 one in place! Instead of virtualenv venv && source venv/bin/activate just do the source myvenv/bin/activate.
3

The easiest way is to change python globally to Python3 as I think you're using it more often than Python 2.7 (or hopefully always). To achieve this, add the following line of code at the end of your .bash_profile:

alias python='python3'

virtuanenv is using /usr/bin/python, hence it should work now.

If you don't want to change it globally, than you should use the following command to create your Python3.6 virtual environment:

python3 -m venv venv

or the explicit Python version if you have multiple Python3 versions installed:

python3.6 -m venv venv

On more suggestion at the end: I recommend you to read something about pipenv as it's the new recommended way to handle virtual environments and your whole package management at once. It's super easy and fixes a lot of common issues. Here's a nice article from realpython.com on that topic.

Hope I could help you. Have a nice day.

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1 Comment

Not matter what I did it always installed PY2. The version number trick there really helped me out. Obviously just python3 did not.

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