

The advantage to installing the app bundle is that it behaves much more like a normal Mac app, and is self-contained. There are two ways to get QGIS on a Mac: installing the app bundle, or installing via Homebrew. You should install with pip or pip3, depending on whether you want to work in Python 2 or Python 3, respectively. These packages are useful for Python processing. # Recommended packages to install with pip Dependencies of this package which will be auto-installed include osgeo-proj, osgeo-postgresql, numpy.The following packages are useful to install for geospatial computing, using the $ brew install command: # Recommended packages to install with Homebrew This can get confusing: for instance, if you run $ brew install gdal, you'll install the Homebrew core formula of gdal (currently v2.4.2), whereas if you run $ brew install osgeo-gdal, you'll install the gdal from the OSGeo4Mac tap (currently v3.0.1). There are some formulae in the OSGeo4Mac tap that also exist in Homebrew's core repository. Note that this only adds the ability to install packages from the OSGeo4Mac repository-you haven't actually installed any packages by running this command. OSGeo4Mac maintains a tap of geospatial software, which you can add to Homebrew by running $ brew tap osgeo/osgeo4mac. You can also connect Homebrew to additional libraries of packages using what are called taps.

Homebrew has several hundred packages (called formulae) that it knows how to install on its own see for a list. In most cases, it's better to install via Homebrew, though, if you're finding that you only have a package installed for Python 2 or Python 3, you can try also installing with pip. There are some Python packages which can be installed by both pip and Homebrew. See how the python3 and pip3 executables are in /usr/local? That's as it should be.

Run the following to install a Homebrew Python 3: In other words, if you run brew install python, the command python -version will still output your preinstalled version of Python 2. Confusingly, the Homebrew package python installs the executable python3, and leaves the executable python pointing to the macOS preinstalled version of Python 2. Homebrew no longer supports Python 2, since Python 2 was officially declared end-of-life as of January 1, 2020. It's preferable to use Homebrew installed versions of Python for active development work, because you can then use Homebrew to install necessary Python packages, and anything else that you install with Homebrew will bind and compile against these versions of Python. If you run which python from the Terminal, you should get /usr/bin/python, which is the preinstalled Python try python -version to check which version this is. MacOS comes bundled with a preinstalled version of Python 2. $ brew upgrade # Installing Homebrew's Python
