From the course: Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Installing Python on a Mac - Python Tutorial

From the course: Programming Foundations: Fundamentals

Installing Python on a Mac

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- If you're using a Mac computer, getting Python setup is very easy. The Mac operating system ships with the version of Python already installed. If you're using Windows, please skip to the next video, as I'll walk you through how to get set up. To check what version of Python is installed, we're going to open a Terminal window. Terminal is an application that lets you run commands to explore directories, execute scripts, and yes, work with Python. To open up Terminal, we're going to go to our Finder, then applications. Go to utilities and open up Terminal. You can also do this with a shortcut by typing command + space, and then spelling out terminal and hitting Enter. Let's go ahead and close down our Finder window. From here, we can check what version of Python we have installed. To do that, we're going to type Python, all in lowercase letters, and then hit Enter. Let me go ahead and zoom in a bit so you can see what I'm doing. The first thing you notice is that it prints out the version of Python that we're running on the machine. Now, typically, when we say print out in programming, we don't mean go grab a piece of paper from the printer. Instead, it's referring to displaying the result of a command on your screen. Programming languages have version numbers associated with them, because over time, new features are added. By increasing the version number, the developers of the language are communicating that they've changed something and it could impact how you use the language. At the time of this recording, we have Python two dot seven dot ten installed. Notice how we're inside of the Python prompt. This is denoted by the three angle brackets. This is letting us know that the computer is ready for us to send it some Python instructions. But for now, we're just going to go ahead and exit. We can do this by typing exit, and then a open and closed parentheses and hitting Enter. If for some reason you don't see the version of Python that's installed, or you're not sure if you're running the latest version of Python, you can head over to python.org/downloads. Let's do that now. Here, you can see the latest version of Python that's available for your operating system. In this case, Python three dot seven dot three is the latest version. And since this is newer than what we have installed on our Mac, let's go ahead and download it. Once it's finished downloading, you can go ahead and double click the file to open it up. This will show you the Python installer. Let's click on continue to walk our way through the wizard. Now you may have to enter your password to let your computer know that you're okay installing Python. And that's it, we have Python installed. Let's go ahead and close all of these windows. Now that we have it downloaded, we no longer need this window. So we'll close it, and we're back here inside of our Terminal. Just to make sure we have the latest version available, we're going to restart. So let's quit, we'll use that shortcut, Command + Space bar, and then terminal. And now let's type the Python three command, no spaces between. Great! And just like that, we're running the latest version of Python. If for some reason you're not able to get Python installed, I've added a troubleshooting guide for you, but otherwise, you should be running the latest and greatest version of Python.

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