How to Install pyenv

[ankraft]

This guide shortly describes how to install the pyenv virtual environment manager.

Pyenv is only officially supported on Linux/MacOS systems, so we will focus on these OS environments.

In addition, we will install pyenv-virtualenv. This is a pyenv plugin for creating and managing virtual Python environments.

Prerequisites

Homebrew

This guide assumes that you have installed homebrew.

MacOS: Xcode dependencies

On MacOS: install Xcode dependencies:

Xcode-select --install

Installing pyenv

Install pyenv using homebrew:

brew upgrade
brew install pyenv

Install extra libraries:

brew install readline xz

Install virtualenv using homebrew:

brew install pyenv-virtualenv

Getting Started

The following command installs Python 3.11.7 in pyenv:

pyenv install 3.11.7

Since we don't want to use an installed Python version directly, we will create a new virtual environment, e.g. taking version 3.11.7 as a base version. The following command will create a virtual environment acme-3.11:

pyenv virtualenv 3.11.7 acme-3.11

We can now enable a virtual environment for the local directory:

pyenv local acme-3.11