Managing and installing pip3 modules with venv and requirements.txt on MacOS

External python dependencies can be installed with pip, and managed as a list of dependencies for your project with a requirements.txt file. To install dependencies for a project, use:

> python3 -m pip install -r requirements.txt

On MacOS, it’s no longer possible to install global modules, unless you force the install with the ‘–break-system-packages’ option, if you pip like above, you’ll see the error:

error: externally-managed-environment
× This environment is externally managed

Instead, create a virtual environment for your project where dependencies local to your project are installed:

> python3 -m venv .venv
> source .venv/bin/activate

Now you can run pip install and all dependent modules will be installed beneath .venv in your project folder.

Previous posts about AI Models and Code Generation

If you browse online software development communities, questions from new developers about AI replacing the need for developers are asked almost daily.

Here’s a couple of my past posts on this topic from 2023 and 2022 which I feel still hold true: