We all have been there trying to figure out the root cause of failure of your scripts, we finally decide to get ride of python once and for all (not really ;))

This is my opinionated post on how to clean python completely from your system and then do a fresh install

Use Homebrew to do the heavy lifting

check to see if homebrew is installed on your system. more info on its website -> https://brew.sh/

$ brew --version
Homebrew 2.5.11
Homebrew/homebrew-core (git revision d4069; last commit 2020-11-18)
Homebrew/homebrew-cask (git revision 0374c82; last commit 2020-11-18)

If you don't see the above, lets install homebrew.

$ /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Now you should be able to run

$ brew --version

Clean up existing Python installations

Note please dont remove the existing python 2.7 which comes along with your mac, there might be apps using this !

so the default installation of python exists at /usr/bin/python, lets keep it as is
However, the python installations located in /usr/local/bin are often symbolic links and can be deleted.

List all those by running

$ ls -l /usr/local/bin/ | grep python*

You should now see a list of links which are most likely installed in this path -> ../../../Library/Frameworks/Python.framework. If Python were to be installed by Homebrew, it would be installed in the path -> /Cellar/python@...

Clean up all python links

$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/python*
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/pip*
$ sudo rm /usr/local/bin/easy*

Remove versions of python install in the Framework path

$ sudo rm -Rf /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/*

Environment setup

open ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile and clean up all the references to python Framework path and only have

export PATH='/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:$PATH'

Install Python using brew

Using brew install python

$ brew install python3

Note: as of Nov 17, 2020: the above command will install python@3.9

To always keep the python updated using brew

$ brew upgrade

Hope this helps keep a clean and updated python version

🍻