IDLE and python is different, not able to install modules properly

Question

thanks for reading this. I am using macOS High Sierra. I am not very familiar with terminal or environment variables, but am trying to learn more. From reading other threads and google, it seems like I either have multiple pythons installed, or have pythons running from different paths. However I am not able to find a solution to resolving this, either by re-pathing my IDLE or deleting it entirely.

I do have python, python launcher, and anaconda (not very sure how anaconda works, have it installed a few years back and didn't touch it) installed. I am trying to install pandas (pip install pandas), which tells me that I have it installed, but when I run it on IDLE, it says module not found. Though if i run python3 on terminal and type my code in, it works (so pandas has indeed been installed).

When i run which python on terminal, it returns /Users/myname/anaconda3/bin/python (when i enter into this directory from terminal, it shows that in the bin folder, I have python, python.app, python3, python3-config, python3.7, python3.7-config, python3.7m, python3.7m-config)

When i run which idle on terminal, it returns /usr/bin/idle (im not even sure how to find this directory from the terminal)

When i run import os; print(os.path) on IDLE, it returns module 'posixpath' from '/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.7/lib/python3.7/posixpath.py'

Would really appreciate some help to figure out how to ensure that when i install modules from terminal, it would be installed into the same python as the one IDLE is using. Also, I would like to know whether it is possible for me to work on VSCode instead of IDLE. I cant seem to find suitable extensions for data science and its related modules (like statsmodels, pandas etc). Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

To repeat and summarized what has been said on various other question answers:

1a. 3rd party packages are installed for a particular python(3).exe binary.

1b. To install multiple packages to multiple binaries, see the option from python -m pip -h.

2. To find out which python binary is running, execute import sys; print(sys.executable).

3a. For 3rd party package xyz usually installed in some_python/Lib/site-packages, IDLE itself has nothing to do with whether import xyz works. It only matters whether xyz is installed for 'somepython' (see 1a).

3b. To run IDLE with 'somepython', run somepython -m idlelib in a terminal or console. somepython can be a name recognized by the OS or a path to a python executable.

Answer 2

First of all, a quick description of anaconda:

Anaconda is meant to help you manage multiple python "environments", each one potentially having its own python version and installed packages (with their own respective versions). This is really useful in cases where you would like multiple python versions for different tasks or when there is some conflict in versions of packages, required by other ones. By default, anaconda creates a "base" environment with a specific python version, IDLE and pip. Also, anaconda provides an improved way (with respect to pip) of installing and managing packages via the command conda install <package-name>.

For the rest, I will be using the word "vanilla" to refer to the python/installation that you manually set up, independent of anaconda.

Explanation of the problem:

Now, the problem arises since you also installed python independently. The details of the problem depend on how exactly you set up both python and anaconda, so I cannot tell you exactly what went wrong. Also, I am not an OSX user, so I have no idea how python is installed and what it downloads/sets alongside. By your description however, it seems that the "vanilla" python installation did not overwrite neither your anaconda python nor anaconda's pip, but it did install IDLE and set it up to use this new python.

So right now, when you are downloading something via pip, only the python from anaconda is able to see that and not IDLE's python.

Possible solutions:

1. Quick fix:

Just run IDLE via /Users/myname/anaconda3/bin/idle3 every time. This one uses anaconda's python and should be able to see all packages installed via conda install of pip install (*). I get this is tiresome, but you don't have to delete anything. You can also set an "alias" in your ~/.bashrc file to make the command idle specifically linking you there. Let me know with a comment if you would like me to explain how to do that, as this answer will get too long and redundant.

2. Remove conda altogether (not recommended)

You can search google on how to uninstall anaconda along with everything that it has installed. What I do not know at this point is whether your "vanilla" python will become the default, whether you will need to also manually install pip again and whether there is the need to reinstall python in order for everything to work properly.

3. Remove your python "vanilla" installation and only use anaconda

Again, I do not know how python installation works in OSX, but it should be reasonably straightforward to uninstall it. The problem now is that probably you will not have a launcher for IDLE (since I am guessing anaconda doesn't provide one on OSX) but you will be able to use it via the terminal as described in 1..

4. Last resort:

If everything fails, simply uninstall both your vanilla python (which I presume will also uninstall IDLE) and anaconda which will uninstall its own python, pip and idle versions. The relevant documentation should not be difficult to follow. Then, reinstall whichever you want anew.

Finally:

When you solve your problems, any IDE you choose, being VScode (I haven't use that either), pycharm or something else, will probably be able to integrate with your installed python. There is no need to install a new python "bundle" with every IDE.

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(*): Since you said that after typing pip install pandas your anaconda's python can import pandas while IDLE cannot, I am implying in my answer that pip is also the one that comes with anaconda. You can make sure this is the case by typing which pip which should point to an anaconda directory, probably /Users/myname/anaconda3/bin/pip

Answer 3

First: This would be a comment if I had enough reputation.

Second: I would just delete python. Everything. And reinstall it.