I chose to use Anaconda to manage my Python installation in favor of the OSX stock Python 2.7 or brew’d Python. This makes it easy to switch between Python 2 and Python 3, and it works well with Project Jupyter.

I would like to default to Python 3.4.3, because that works best with iPython notebooks in Project Jupyter. But npm packages often use node-gyp to build, and node-gyp is not compatible with Python 3. When I tried to install the npm fsevents package, I got the following error:

gyp ERR! configure error 
gyp ERR! stack Error: Python executable "python" is v3.4.3, which is not supported by gyp.
gyp ERR! stack You can pass the --python switch to point to Python >= v2.5.0 & < 3.0.0.
gyp ERR! stack     at failPythonVersion (/usr/local/lib/node_modules/npm/node_modules/node-gyp/lib/configure.js:108:14)
...

It is possible to specify a python version when npm installing npm install --python=python2.7. We can also configure npm to use a specific version of python (stackoverflow).

$ npm config set python python2.7

This solved the node-gyp problem, but created another problem. By default, npm modules installed with the -g are installed to /usr/local. You can check where global npm modules are stored with

$ npm config get prefix

I usually just use sudo when installing global npm modules in OSX. However, for some reason the when I sudo npm install -g with with npm configured to use Python 2.7, Python ran as a different user without admin privileges, and failed. (Does anyone know why?)

It is safe to use sudo when npm installing, but I would prefer to sudo as little as possible. To solve the problem, I configured npm to install global packages to a directory that does not require admin privileges.

It is not difficult to configure npm to use a custom path for storing global modules (stackoverflow).

$ npm config set prefix '~/.npm-packages'

Then add the following to .bashrc (linux) .bash_profile (osx)

export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.npm-packages/bin"

This allows us to npm install -g without sudo. It also allows Anaconda to manage python installations, giving us Python 3.4.3 by default in the terminal.