Before you can write your first Python program, you need to download the appropriate Python interpreter on your Mac operating system.
Python programming language is freely available for all the three known platforms for Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS.
In this tutorial, we are going to see a step-by-step guide on how to download and install the latest version of Python language interpreter on Mac OS.
Pre-requisites:
- MacOS
- Login as administrator on the terminal
Before you install the latest version of Python on a Mac platform, check which operating system your Mac uses. To do this, click the Apple icon in the top left of the screen and pick out About This Mac from the drop-down menu.
Installing Python on a Mac OS
There are the following steps to install the latest version of Python on MacOS platform.
1) Checking Python’s version on the machine:
First, check the latest version of the Python currently installed on your system. In general, Python 2.7 is installed by default on the Mac operating system.
Let’s check the latest version of python on the Mac machine by the following command:
$python --version
As we can see from the above screenshot, by default, Python 2.7.10 has installed on the Mac OS system, hence we will install the latest version of Python 3 on MacOS.
2) Download Python 3.10.6
(a) In order to install Python 3.10.6, you must download the latest version of Python from its official website https://www.python.org/downloads/. Click on the macOS to go to the Python versions page.
(b) Now click on the latest Python 3 Release – Python 3.10.6 to go to the files download page.
(c) Scroll below to the Files section. Click on the macOS 64-bit universal2 installer to download the file on your Mac OS. The file will automatically start to download in .pkg format which we can directly install by using Installer command.
3) Install Python 3.10.6
After the completion of the downloading, go to the file and double click the .pkg to start the installation process. Choose the Continue button and then Install button to accept the default settings.
4) Open IDLE
Once the installation process is finished, check that it was successful by opening the IDLE program. Search for it in Spotlight or open the “Applications” folder, then the “Python” folder, and double-click “IDLE”. A Python 3.10.6 shell window will open up.
The Python Shell provides an efficient, powerful, and user-friendly interface with an easy-to-navigate drop down menu and useful editing features.
It offers many functionality than the command-line interface. We can use it to run our programs and work interactively with Python.
In this tutorial, we have discussed how to download and install Python on Mac OS platform step by step. Hope that you will have successfully installed Python language interpreter on Mac machine. In the next tutorial, we will write the first program in Python with a few simple steps.
Thanks for reading!!!
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