How do I deal with pip in different python versions?

Question

I had python 3.8 installed and then I installed python 2.7. I am trying to run a python program with py -2 program.py in vs code using with python 2.7 as selected environment and I am getting an error, ImportError: No module named googlemaps even though I have already installed.

If I run the program using Python3 then it would run fine. Also when I open vs code using python 2.7 as selected runtime environment then I would get a warning Linter Pylint is not installed . If I click on install then I would get another warning There's no Pip installer available in the selected environment .

Also even though I have changed the python path from 3.7 to 2.7, default python version will still show up as 3.7 when I run Python in command line.

Things that I have tried to install the googlemaps module for python 2 after googling for solutions,

pip2 install googlemaps--upgrade

py -2 -m pip install googlemaps

Answer 1

If you have your python2 binary located, you can just call it directly:

/usr/bin/python2 -m pip install googlemaps

And if you're not sure where your python binary is, you can use

import sys
print(sys.executable)

to locate it.

And if you don't have pip, you should install it by downloading this file: https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

then running:

/usr/bin/python2 get-pip.py

Answer 2

It is recommended to install Python 3.8 using Pyenv and also when you are using different versions of python, it is very useful

curl https://pyenv.run | bash
pyenv install 3.8.1
pyenv virtualenv 3.8.1 venv
pyenv local venv

with pyenv local you set your version for use. If after this you run

pyenv version

It will output to 3.8.1

With regards to pip installation, run

whereis python

and if it outputs to

usr/bin/python2 then you can use pip for installing python2 packages and pip3 for packages compatible to python3.