Poetry No such file or directory: 'python' Error on MacOS

Recently, I had to do some work with LangChain and wanted to create an environment with the poetry install command. When I ran the command, I got the following error:

$ poetry install

[Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'python'

Browsing the web, I came accross the python-is-python3 package in several places [1, 2]. However, I didn’t want to install this package.

First reason was that I used brew to install packages and formula for python-is-python3 didn’t exist in the brew repository. Everything you can download in brew needs a formula (see). Second reason was that it felt excessive to download a whole package for this error.

Upon more research, I came across brew documentation on Python. The documentation refers to symlinks for python, pip etc:

Unversioned symlinks for python, python-config, pip etc. are installed here:

$(brew --prefix python)/libexec/bin

I checked where my python was installed by running brew --prefix python and replaced the directory in the command above. I then added this to my path in .zshrc.

First, run the following to edit the .zshrc file:

nano ~/.zshrc

Add the following line to update the PATH (after replacing <python-prefix> with the result of brew --prefix python):

export PATH="$PATH:<python-prefix>/libexec/bin"

This will add the symlinks to your path, and you will be able to run pip or python in your console. This will also solve the error in poetry.