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The Monterey 12.3 upgrade removes Python 2.7 with no user warnings. Homebrew only knows about Python 3. What other ways are there to get Python 2 back up and running?

I'm not interested in hearing arguments about deprecation. We're not a dev shop, just a small mail order business with some internal scripts that need to work again.

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  • Just remember to ensure that all your scripts use #! /usr/bin/env python not #! /usr/bin/python. TBH if you just make sure that print statements have brackets and unicode strings are handled correctly, your scripts should work in python3.
    – benwiggy
    Mar 17, 2022 at 9:55
  • stackoverflow.com/a/71513250/786389
    – Josh Hibschman
    Mar 17, 2022 at 13:49
  • @benwiggy - they didn't. Scripts were querying a SQLite database: returned as strings in Python 2, not in 3. Also, the database had '-' for missing numeric values, which Python 2 is fine comparing with a number, but 3 throws an exception
    – scruss
    Mar 20, 2022 at 1:14
  • thanks for question and answer, but, honestly, you can't stick to Python 2 indefinitely. The incompatibilities you mention seem easy to solve. There will be others, of course, but still... And SO is here to help!
    – Walter Tross
    Jun 30, 2022 at 16:28
  • believe me, @WalterTross - they're not easy to solve, at least not in the very limited time I have to do so. Since I have the source of Python 2, I do believe I can stick with Python 2 indefinitely
    – scruss
    Jul 1, 2022 at 17:10

2 Answers 2

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The Python Release Python 2.7.18 | Python.org download page has a macOS 64-bit installer download that replaces the missing interpreter.

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  • Yes: that's the easiest and simplest way.
    – benwiggy
    Mar 17, 2022 at 9:53
  • It's good for me
    – Ven Shine
    Mar 25, 2022 at 7:27
  • 2
    Previous versions of MacOS had 2.7 at /usr/bin/python and installing it this way puts it at /usr/local/bin/python so you either need to make a symlink or potentially update the path in your scripts.
    – Joel Mellon
    Apr 8, 2022 at 18:31
  • Adding to what @JoelMellon said: If a script was hard-coding #!/usr/bin/python, you should update it to do #!/usr/bin/env python (or #!/usr/bin/env python2 or #!/usr/bin/env python3) instead, to make it more portable.
    – Maxpm
    Jan 13 at 16:21
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MacPorts packages python27.

I also found an unofficial tap, if you must use Homebrew for some reason, in about 10 sec of searching.

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