best way to start shell / work under different Pythons

• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.
• I have searched the documentation and believe that my question is not covered.

Question

My system python, as returned by /usr/bin/env python is Python 2.7, so for me, by default I get a Python 2.7 env, which is no longer what I want 😉

Probably a non poetry question: but how would I change my system, config so that /usr/bin/env python return which python3.7?

In any case, I still need to support 2.7 and 3.6+ on most of my libraries, so it looks like I can do this by doing the following:

python3.7 `which poetry` shell
poetry install

…for a 3.7 env, and the following for a 2.7 env:

poetry shell
poetry install

Is that the best way or have I missed something? Does this need to be in the docs somewhere or have I just missed them?

[cjw296]

Ah, true. I guess pyenv is close to what I want, but building everything seems silly. That’s a rant for the pyenv tracker though, so I think I have my answer here 😃

[purificant]

Sounds like pyenv is not a good choice for your use case.

If you require using a specific build of python, then I would create a virtual environment using that interpreter, activate it, which should point python to the desired version / build and then run poetry inside it. Poetry will detect that it’s inside a virtual environment and install packages accordingly.