How to install Poetry in MacOS

Poetry is a tool for dependency management and packaging in Python. While there are many ways to install Poetry in your mac and you can find them in the Getting started section in their official website, I’m gonna share the way I manage to install it with details including some steps and troubles I faced which was not mentioned in the official website, so this might help some fellow developers :)

Poetry — Python Packaging Management

I installed Poetry through pipx which used for installing and running Python applications in isolated environments. if you already have it, you can skip this few lines and go to Install Poetry using pipx section, but if you don’t, you can install it through brew

brew install pipx

Tip: if you don’t have the Xcode Command Line Tools yet installed, you will get an error while installing pipx through brew. You can install the Command Line Tools by running xcode-select — install

Once installed, you need to run the following to update your PATH environment variable.

pipx ensurepath

Install Poetry using pipx

Alright, now let’s install poetry by running:

pipx install poetry

Once it’s installed, if you run any poetry command, depends on which command-line interpreter you are using, you probably seeing this or a similar error: zsh: command not found: poetry

This is because poetry path is not appended to your command-line interpreter ( This part was one of the parts not mentioned in their official doc ). I’m using Oh My Zsh and there are some additional steps we need to do.

First, as mentioned in their documentation, we need to run the following which will create a poetry folder in this path.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/poetry

mkdir $ZSH_CUSTOM/plugins/poetry

Then you need to update your ~/.zshrc file to add poetry in the plugins section.

nano ~/.zshrc

// Or code ~/.zshrc if you are using VSCode

Here you need to look for plugins=() the plugins added here seperated by space, so add poetry to plugins.

plugins=(git poetry)

And last but not the least, you need to add the poetry path, so at the end of your .zshrc file, add the following:

export PATH="$HOME/.poetry/bin:$PATH"

if you are using windows, you need to set the path in this way: set PATH=%APPDATA%\Python\Scripts

Now you can either run source ~/.zshrc or close and open your terminal and poetry is now ready to go 🚀.

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