Switch between python 2.7 and python 3.5 on Mac OS X

IMHO, the best way to use two different Python versions on macOS is via homebrew. After installing homebrew on macOS, run the commands below on your terminal.

brew install python@2brew install python

Now you can run Python 2.7 by invoking python2 or Python 3 by invoking python3. In addition to this, you can use virtualenv or pyenv to manage different versions of python environments.

I have never personally used miniconda but from the documentation, it looks like it is similar to using pip and virtualenv in combination.

OSX's Python binary (version 2) is located at /usr/bin/python

if you use which python it will tell you where the python command is being resolved to. Typically, what happens is third parties redefine things in /usr/local/bin (which takes precedence, by default over /usr/bin). To fix, you can either run /usr/bin/python directly to use 2.x or find the errant redefinition (probably in /usr/local/bin or somewhere else in your PATH)

I already had python3 installed(via miniconda3) and needed to install python2 alongside in that case brew install python won't install python2, so you would needbrew install python@2 .

Now alias python2 refers to python2.x from /usr/bin/python

and alias python3 refers to python3.x from /Users/ishandutta2007/miniconda3/bin/python

and alias python refers to python3 by default.

Now to use python as alias for python2, I added the following to .bashrc file

alias python='/usr/bin/python'.

To go back to python3 as default just remove this line when required.