Installing Python 3 on Mac OS X. The version of Python that ships with OS X is great for learning, but it’s not good for development. The version shipped with OS X may be out of date from the official current Python release, which is considered the stable production version. Jan 09, 2012 If you've developed a USB device-access application to run in a PowerPC-based Macintosh, you probably perform some byte swapping on data you read from the USB bus because the PowerPC processor uses the big-endian format. For example, the USB configuration descriptor structure contains a two-byte field that holds the descriptor length.
Bob Savage <bobsavage@mac.com>
Python on a Macintosh running Mac OS X is in principle very similar to Python onany other Unix platform, but there are a number of additional features such asthe IDE and the Package Manager that are worth pointing out.
The Mac-specific modules are documented in Mac OS X specific services.
Python on Mac OS 9 or earlier can be quite different from Python on Unix orWindows, but is beyond the scope of this manual, as that platform is no longersupported, starting with Python 2.4. See http://www.cwi.nl/~jack/macpython forinstallers for the latest 2.3 release for Mac OS 9 and related documentation.
4.1. Getting and Installing MacPython¶
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Mac OS X 10.8 comes with Python 2.7 pre-installed by Apple. If you wish, youare invited to install the most recent version of Python from the Python website(https://www.python.org). A current “universal binary” build of Python, whichruns natively on the Mac’s new Intel and legacy PPC CPU’s, is available there.
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What you get after installing is a number of things:
- A
MacPython2.7
folder in yourApplications
folder. In hereyou find IDLE, the development environment that is a standard part of officialPython distributions; PythonLauncher, which handles double-clicking Pythonscripts from the Finder; and the “Build Applet” tool, which allows you topackage Python scripts as standalone applications on your system. - A framework
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework
, which includes thePython executable and libraries. The installer adds this location to your shellpath. To uninstall MacPython, you can simply remove these three things. Asymlink to the Python executable is placed in /usr/local/bin/.
The Apple-provided build of Python is installed in
/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework
and /usr/bin/python
,respectively. You should never modify or delete these, as they areApple-controlled and are used by Apple- or third-party software. Remember thatif you choose to install a newer Python version from python.org, you will havetwo different but functional Python installations on your computer, so it willbe important that your paths and usages are consistent with what you want to do.IDLE includes a help menu that allows you to access Python documentation. If youare completely new to Python you should start reading the tutorial introductionin that document.
If you are familiar with Python on other Unix platforms you should read thesection on running Python scripts from the Unix shell.
4.1.1. How to run a Python script¶
Your best way to get started with Python on Mac OS X is through the IDLEintegrated development environment, see section The IDE and use the Help menuwhen the IDE is running.
If you want to run Python scripts from the Terminal window command line or fromthe Finder you first need an editor to create your script. Mac OS X comes with anumber of standard Unix command line editors, vim andemacs among them. If you want a more Mac-like editor,BBEdit or TextWrangler from Bare Bones Software (seehttp://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/index.html) are good choices, as isTextMate (see https://macromates.com/). Other editors includeGvim (http://macvim.org) and Aquamacs(http://aquamacs.org/).
To run your script from the Terminal window you must make sure that
/usr/local/bin
is in your shell search path.To run your script from the Finder you have two options:
- Drag it to PythonLauncher
- Select PythonLauncher as the default application to open yourscript (or any .py script) through the finder Info window and double-click it.PythonLauncher has various preferences to control how your script islaunched. Option-dragging allows you to change these for one invocation, or useits Preferences menu to change things globally.
4.1.2. Running scripts with a GUI¶
With older versions of Python, there is one Mac OS X quirk that you need to beaware of: programs that talk to the Aqua window manager (in other words,anything that has a GUI) need to be run in a special way. Use pythonwinstead of python to start such scripts.
With Python 2.7, you can use either python or pythonw.
4.1.3. Configuration¶
Python on OS X honors all standard Unix environment variables such as
PYTHONPATH
, but setting these variables for programs started from theFinder is non-standard as the Finder does not read your .profile
or.cshrc
at startup. You need to create a file~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
. See Apple’s Technical Document QA1067 fordetails.For more information on installation Python packages in MacPython, see sectionInstalling Additional Python Packages.
4.2. The IDE¶
MacPython ships with the standard IDLE development environment. A goodintroduction to using IDLE can be found athttps://hkn.eecs.berkeley.edu/~dyoo/python/idle_intro/index.html.
4.3. Installing Additional Python Packages¶
There are several methods to install additional Python packages:
- Packages can be installed via the standard Python distutils mode (
pythonsetup.pyinstall
). - Many packages can also be installed via the setuptools extensionor pip wrapper, see https://pip.pypa.io/.
4.4. GUI Programming on the Mac¶
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There are several options for building GUI applications on the Mac with Python.
PyObjC is a Python binding to Apple’s Objective-C/Cocoa framework, which isthe foundation of most modern Mac development. Information on PyObjC isavailable from https://pythonhosted.org/pyobjc/.
The standard Python GUI toolkit is
Tkinter
, based on the cross-platformTk toolkit (https://www.tcl.tk). An Aqua-native version of Tk is bundled with OSX by Apple, and the latest version can be downloaded and installed fromhttps://www.activestate.com; it can also be built from source.wxPython is another popular cross-platform GUI toolkit that runs natively onMac OS X. Packages and documentation are available from http://www.wxpython.org.
PyQt is another popular cross-platform GUI toolkit that runs natively on MacOS X. More information can be found athttps://riverbankcomputing.com/software/pyqt/intro.
4.5. Distributing Python Applications on the Mac¶
The “Build Applet” tool that is placed in the MacPython 2.7 folder is fine forpackaging small Python scripts on your own machine to run as a standard Macapplication. This tool, however, is not robust enough to distribute Pythonapplications to other users.
The standard tool for deploying standalone Python applications on the Mac ispy2app. More information on installing and using py2app can be foundat http://undefined.org/python/#py2app.
4.6. Other Resources¶
The MacPython mailing list is an excellent support resource for Python users anddevelopers on the Mac:
Another useful resource is the MacPython wiki:
While The Python Language Reference describes the exact syntax andsemantics of the Python language, this library reference manualdescribes the standard library that is distributed with Python. It alsodescribes some of the optional components that are commonly includedin Python distributions.
Python Usb Library Mac Download
Python’s standard library is very extensive, offering a wide range offacilities as indicated by the long table of contents listed below. Thelibrary contains built-in modules (written in C) that provide access tosystem functionality such as file I/O that would otherwise beinaccessible to Python programmers, as well as modules written in Pythonthat provide standardized solutions for many problems that occur ineveryday programming. Some of these modules are explicitly designed toencourage and enhance the portability of Python programs by abstractingaway platform-specifics into platform-neutral APIs.
The Python installers for the Windows platform usually includethe entire standard library and often also include many additionalcomponents. For Unix-like operating systems Python is normally providedas a collection of packages, so it may be necessary to use the packagingtools provided with the operating system to obtain some or all of theoptional components.
In addition to the standard library, there is a growing collection ofseveral thousand components (from individual programs and modules topackages and entire application development frameworks), available fromthe Python Package Index.
- 4. Built-in Constants
- 5. Built-in Types
- 6. Built-in Exceptions
- 7. String Services
- 8. Data Types
- 9. Numeric and Mathematical Modules
- 10. File and Directory Access
- 11. Data Persistence
- 12. Data Compression and Archiving
- 13. File Formats
- 14. Cryptographic Services
- 15. Generic Operating System Services
- 16. Optional Operating System Services
- 17. Interprocess Communication and Networking
- 18. Internet Data Handling
- 19. Structured Markup Processing Tools
- 20. Internet Protocols and Support
- 21. Multimedia Services
- 22. Internationalization
- 23. Program Frameworks
- 24. Graphical User Interfaces with Tk
- 25. Development Tools
- 26. Debugging and Profiling
- 27. Software Packaging and Distribution
- 28. Python Runtime Services
- 29. Custom Python Interpreters
- 30. Restricted Execution
- 31. Importing Modules
- 32. Python Language Services
- 33. Python compiler package
- 34. Miscellaneous Services
- 35. MS Windows Specific Services
- 36. Unix Specific Services
- 37. Mac OS X specific services
- 38. MacPython OSA Modules
- 39. SGI IRIX Specific Services
- 40. SunOS Specific Services
- 41. Undocumented Modules