Appendix A Installing Python on macOS and Windows
In chapter 2, we create a Python web application. This application will be transformed throughout the book to be deployed to Kubernetes.
Before we can start building our application, we need to install Python on our machine. This appendix will help us do that on macOS and Windows. In chapter 2, we cover how to install Python on Linux. For my most up-to-date guide on installing Python, please consider visiting my blog at https://cfe.sh/blog/. If you are interested in the official documentation for installing Python, please visit https://docs.python.org/.
A.1 Python installation for macOS
With macOS, you might be tempted to use third-party installation tools like Homebrew or MacPorts. While these tools are great, I recommend using the official Python installer from the Python website simply because it will ensure we have the exact version we need when we need it. We can have multiple versions of Python installed without any issues.
To start, we need to determine two things:
- Python version
- Processor—Intel or Apple
A.2 Python version
Python 3 is the current version of Python. The current major release (as of January 2023) is Python 3.11.
Throughout the years, Python has improved, but the syntax remains largely the same.
For this book, I recommend Python 3.10, with a minimum release of Python 3.8.