I have run into this under MacOS (10.11), but have seen the same problem under various Linuxes as well. I installed the "official" Python3 package, it goes into /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.4 . (Note: the examples below use Python 3.4, but the issue persists with 3.5 as well. I have no access to a machine that has Python 3.6 due to lack of admin privileges, should the issue have been solved in 3.6.) I need virtual environments and I need the python-config script to figure out which libraries Python3 uses because my project combines Python and C++ code. If I set up the