Brew and PyEnv

PyEnv is a solution, like virtualenv, that helps you maintain parallel environments. PyEnv, however, allows you to maintain parallel versions Python. It will also expose the same versions of the Python tools, like pip. As a bonus, all of your pip packages will be installed locally to your user (no more sudo, at all).

Recently, in order to control and debug a series of sudden environmental problems, I upgraded to Yosemite. Unfortunately, Python 2.7.8 came with it.

I manage a number of components that depend on gevent (for the awesome coroutine functionality), and gevent is not Python3 compatible. Unfortunately, gevent is broken in 2.7.8 (the TypeError: __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'server_hostname' error: https://github.com/asciimoo/searx/issues/120), and there are no strong bug-fixes. You can fix this by hacking-in a no-op parameter to the module on your system, but I’d rather go back to 2.7.6 for all of my local projects, by default, and be running the same thing as the servers.

PyEnv worked great for this:

  1. Install PyEnv:
$ brew install pyenv
  1. Add to your user’s environment script:
$ eval "$(pyenv init -)"
  1. Run the command in (2) directly, or start a new shell.
  2. Download and build 2.7.6 . We installed zlib via Brew, but we had to set the CFLAGS variable to prevent the The Python zlib extension was not compiled. Missing the zlib? message:
$ CFLAGS="-I$(xcrun --show-sdk-path)/usr/include" pyenv install 2.7.6
  1. Elect this as the default, system version:
$ pyenv global 2.7.6
  1. Update the current user’s PyEnv configuration to point to the new Python executables:
$ pyenv rehash