This part of the guide says that it's written for 3, but will work fine with 2.

@kennethreitz:

I'm not sure that's the issue.

Let's say we have a brand new installation of macOS (i.e. we only have a system installation of Python 2.6.x or 2.7.x) and we want to install Python 3. We go here and follow your instructions:

$ brew install python3

The new Python 3 installation will live wherever Homebrew installed it, and we can access that Python 3 and Pip installation by running python3 and pip3:

$ which python3
/usr/local/bin/python3

$ which pip3
/usr/local/bin/pip3

Then, we move onto the virtual environments page...

We are told to check to make sure we have Python and Pip installed by running python --version and pip --version...

But the problem is, those commands are going to reference the system Python installation and there will be no system Pip installed:

$ which python
/usr/bin/python

$ which pip
=> # no output

I think the issue which @thepreacher is trying to report, and which had me scratching my head tonight as well, is the mismatch between the instructions given and the actual commands necessary to complete them on a macOS system which uses your suggested Python installation method.

Also, not sure if this should be in a separate issue or not, but after following the Homebrew installation instructions, USER_BASE is actually ~/Library/Python/3.6, so it might be useful to point out that Mac users will need to export $HOME/Library/Python/3.6/bin to their path, as the ~/.local bit only applies on Linux. Gosh-darn Apple has to ruin everything with their non-standard system hierarchy!

This is confused me too on Mac