nodenv VS pyenv

We recommend installing Node.js using nodenv to manage node versions. This allows your computer to have a specific Node.js version per project.

https://github.com/nodenv/nodenv can automatically symlink to the version you need. Or https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf that does the same thing.

I will not cover this here. A good option is nodenv. For the purposes of this excersie you need to be on node 14.x - 16.x (not 12.x or 17.x).

Install Node into this directory. Since we'll be using react, Node needs to be version 10.16 or later. It's up to you on how you install Node - I personally like using nodenv to manage my node projects.

If you have a requirement for multiple, specific Python versions, why not just use pyenv?

https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

For more information visit: pyenv repository

Note that virtual environments assume you are using the same global version of Python. Often, this is not the case and additional tools like pyenv can be used alongside virtual environments when you need to switch between versions of Python itself on your local machine.

Python version manager pyenv

First of all, install the Python virtual environment from these links: 1 and 2. I developed my GPT-based API in Python version 3.8.18. Pick any Python versions >= 3.7.

Note: Most modern systems will probably have a system environment that meets this requirement, but if yours does not or if you prefer not to install anything in your system environment (even if it's just PDM) check out asdf or pyenv to help install and manage additional Python environments.

When dealing with software development, reproducibility is key. This is why we encourage you to use Python virtual environments to set up an isolated environment for your project. Virtual environments allow the isolation of dependencies, which plays a crucial role to avoid breaking compatibility between different projects. We cannot cover all the details about virtual environments in this post, but we encourage you to learn more about venv, pyenv or conda for a better understanding on how to create and manage virtual environments.

For Python, with your use case I would avoid system packages, no matter the distro. It sounds like it would be worth setting up pyenv and working exclusively with virtual environments.

For OSX there is homebrew or pyenv (pyenv is another solution on Linux). As pyenv compiles from source it will require setting up XCode (the Apple IDE) tools to support this which can be pretty bulky. Windows users have chocolatey but the issue there is it works off the binaries. That means it won't have the latest security release available since those are source only. Conda is also another solution which can be picked up by Visual Studio Code as available versions of Python making development easier. In the end it might be best to consider using WSL on Windows for installing a Linux version and using that instead.