Upgrading pip on macOS

Ben Cook • Posted 2020-12-27 • Last updated 2021-10-15
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There are many different ways to install Python (and therefore pip) on macOS. If you’re struggling with this, here are a few things to try.

If pip is already installed:

pip install --upgrade pip

If you get an error about the pip command not being found, the easiest thing to do is use your Python interpreter:

python -m pip install --upgrade pip

Some installations will also install an alias called pip3:

pip3 install --upgrade pip

If you already have a version of Python installed that does not have pip, you can manually install pip:

curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py
python get-pip.py

Another option is to update your Python installation. New installations of Python usually come with pip out of the box and there are a few ways to do this on Mac.

Installing Python With Homebrew:

brew install python

You can also download the installer from python.org.

Or download the installer from Anaconda. This is what I recommend for scientific computing.