How to find all python installations on mac os x and uninstall all but the native OS X installation

Question

I have installed a few versions on my MacBook for different projects and have only now realized what a mistake that was. I have used homebrew to install it, installed it via

Answer 1

you can start by removing any Python Frameworks in /Library/Frameworks and any User Library (like ~/Library/Frameworks). The system one is in /System/Library/Frameworks.

homebrew and macports install under /usr somewhere IIRC. not sure of other places to look, but you should be able to grep for "Python" to find them all.

be aware, if you have installed other software via homebrew that is dependent on Python, you will break it. you may be able to fix it with symbolic links to the system python, however, some software requires Python 3. as of 10.9 the system has Python 2.3-2.7 only.

Answer 2

It's normal to have many python binaries. You can see which is which in /usr/bin with this command:

$ ls -l /usr/bin/python*

You will see several links to different places. The native python is that one, which is in the /System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin/. Note that for OSX 10.9 (and for everything at least until 10.13) this is the python2, not python3. So you can safely remove all the other versions.

What are the other versions which you may have?

• Something downloaded from the official site python.org. It is located in /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/. You can remove this.
• Anaconda distribution is by default located in /Users/your_user/anaconda3/, but of course you may put in the other place. But if it contains anaconda in the path – it's Anaconda distribution. You may remove this folder.
• Either homebrew or port versions are in /opt/local/bin/. See the link destination with $ ln -l /opt/local/bin/python*. The best way of removing this is to use built-in commands like uninstall.
• Some packages might be in ~/Library/Python/ - that's from pip. You may safely remove the entire content of this folder in order to have a "clean" python.
• Finally, after you removed all the other versions, do not forget to remove the broken links to binaries, if there are still any.

See also this answer.