If you want to setup OS X for python programming and don’t know where or how to begin? Well I’m going to guess your first step will be to ask the “oracle” (Google), and based on the search result’s you’re going to find out theres ton of ways on setting up your mac (python) dev-environment.

As of July 22nd, 2017 this guide is deprecated.

Note: The following is a quick setup guide on how to install python on OS X with Homebrew.

The proper ten minute setup:

Open your terminal app of choice.

Assuming you already have Homebrew installed, let’s begin with some ‘housekeeping’:

brew update && brew upgrade --all && brew cleanup && brew prune && brew doctor

Now let’s install Python:

brew install python --build-from-source

Now, let’s do some pip housekeeping:

pip install --upgrade pip setuptools

Finally, let’s also update all pip packages:

pip freeze --local | grep -v '^\-e' | cut -d = -f 1  | xargs pip install -U

There you have it, you’re ready to begin programming in python; have fun!