My first impressions with pyenv

pyenv provides an easy way to install almost any version of python from a large list of distributions. I have simply been using the version of python from the os package manager for awhile, but recently I bumped my home system to Ubuntu 21.10 impish, and it is only 3.9+ while the libraries I needed were only compatable with up to 3.8.

I needed to install an older version of python on ubuntu

I've been wanting to check out pyenv for awhile now, but without a burning need to do so.

installing

Based on the Readme it looked like I needed to install using homebrew,so this is what I did, but I later realized that there is a pyenv-installer repo that may have saved me this need.

List out install candidates

You can list all of the available versions to install with
pyenv install --list. It does reccomend updating pyenv if you suspect that it is missing one. At the time of writing this comes out to 532 different versions!

Let's install the latest 3.8 patch

Installing a version is as easy as pyenv install 3.8.12. This will install it, but not make it active anywhere.

let's use python 3.8.12 while in this directory

Running pyenv local will set the version of python that we wish to use while in this directory and any directory underneath of it while using the pyenv command.

.python-version file

This creates a .python-version files in the directory I ran it in, that contains simply the version number.

using with pipx

I immediately ran into the same issue I was having before when trying to run pipx, as pipx was running my system python. I had to install pipx in the python3.8 environment to get it to use it.

python is still the system python

When I open a terminal and call python its still my system python that I installed and set with update-alternatives. I am not sure if this is expected or based on how I had installed the system python previously, but it's what happened on my system.

making a virtual environment

To make a virtual environment, I simply ran pyenv exec python in place of where I would normally run python and it worked for me. There is a whole package to get pyenv and venv to play nicely together, so I suspect that there is more to it, but this worked well for me and I was happy.

Now when my virtual environment is active it points to the python in that virtual environment, and is the version of python that was used to create the environment.

Links

I wrote this during my first few minutes of using pyenv. It's been working great for me since then and has been practically invisible. If you have more experience with pyenv I would really appreciate a comment on your experience below.