Installing Poetry system-wide

I recently got some feedback (thank you @simmel, much appreciated!) on a previous post on debugging Poetry. I then realized it was a bit hard to follow if all you wanted to do was to install Poetry globally, with some added control from the default installation method.

This post aims to focus on this and cover the different system-wide installation alternatives that I am aware of.

System-wide install with pipx

You can very easily make Poetry available system-wide, by just following the installation docs. However, this makes it a bit harder to e.g. install in-development builds of Poetry. By leveraging pipx, this can be solved:

Install Poetry with pipx

# macOS
brew install pipx
pipx install poetry

# Linux (apt-get)
apt install pipx
pipx install poetry

Yeah, sorry Windows users. No easy setup here that I am aware of, unfortunately. The only reasonable package manager for Windows is winget, in my opinion, and that has no pipx or poetry package.

In-development Poetry builds

Using pipx, we can install Poetry from git repo. Pipx also has a nice “suffix” feature, which can be used to differentiate the different installations.

Install variations of Poetry with @suffix

# Install from master branch as poetry@master
$ pipx install --suffix=@master --force git+https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry.git

# Install from develop branch as poetry@develop
$ pipx install --suffix=@develop --force git+https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry.git@develop

# Install from release/tag 1.2.0rc1
$ pipx install --suffix=@1.2.0rc1 --force git+https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry.git#1.2.0rc1

# Install from PR #3967 as poetry@3967
$ pipx install --suffix=@3967 --force git+https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry.git@refs/pull/3967/head

# Install from local folder as poetry@local
$ pipx install --suffix=@local --force ~/code/repos/poetry

Note that the --force option makes it possible to run those commands again, to “update” to the current code in either master or in the pull request.

List all Poetry installations

Run pipx list to see all installations of Poetry:

$ pipx list                                                                                              
venvs are in ~/.local/pipx/venvs
apps are exposed on your $PATH at ~/.local/bin
package poetry 1.1.11, Python 3.10.0
    - poetry
package poetry 1.2.0a0 (poetry@3967), Python 3.10.0
    - poetry@3967
package poetry 1.1.0a3 (poetry@develop), Python 3.10.0
    - poetry@develop
package poetry 1.2.0a2 (poetry@local), Python 3.10.0
    - poetry@local
package poetry 1.2.0a2 (poetry@master), Python 3.10.0
    - poetry@master

Bonus: use pyenv to control the Python interpreter used by pipx and poetry

In the examples above, you don’t really control the underlying Python interpreter version. If that’s important to you, you can use e.g. pyenv to manage Python interpeter installations

Control the Python interpreter used by pipx and poetry with pyenv

$ pyenv install 3.10.0  # install CPython 3.10.0 into ~/.pyenv/versions/3.10.0
$ pyenv global 3.10.0  # make 'python' and 'pip' use CPython 3.10.0
$ pip install pipx  # install pipx into the 3.10.0 installation
$ pipx install poetry  # install poetry in ~/.local/pipx/venvs/poetry and its binary in ~/.local/bin/poetry
$ pyenv global system  # stop making 'python' and 'pip' point use CPython 3.10.0 and revert it back to system-default

$ pipx --version

You can read more about what each pyenv command does in the pyenv documentation. You’ll also have to add some paths to your $PATH (as part of installing pyenv and pipx) for this to work.