Restore MacOS system Python3 version

Question

I somehow managed to mess up my system-wide Python3 installation for my fresh MacOS Catalina installation. The problem is with pip – I upgraded the system pip version with sudo pip3 install --upgrade pip . After doing so, I got error messages from pip saying:

WARNING: pip is being invoked by an old script wrapper. This will fail in a future version of pip. Please see https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/5599 for advice on fixing the underlying issue. To avoid this problem you can invoke Python with '-m pip' instead of running pip directly.

Then, in a (failed) attempt to downgrade pip to the previous version to remove this error, I uninstalled this version of pip with sudo pip3 uninstall pip - not my smartest move, I know. Now, with pip3 –version I get the following output:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/pip3", line 6, in <module> from pip._internal import main ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pip'

I know I can install other versions of python and pip with brew (this is what I am currently doing), but I know that a fair number of system services and applications rely on the system-installed python, so I would like to fix this issue.

Answer 1

sudo pip3 uninstall pip will only uninstall pip, it won't uninstall python. You can just reinstall pip.

To reinstall pip:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
python3 get-pip.py --user
rm get-pip.py

Then you should run pip as python3 -m pip instead of pip3 , or else create an alias for pip3 in your ~/.profile (or ~/.bashrc / ~/.bash_aliases for Linux bash users):

alias pip3='python3 -m pip'