Making Big Sur and pyenv play nicely

Soon after Big Sur came out, I received my new work laptop. I decided to upgrade to it. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the Python set up needed for Sentry required some changes. Since it took me a bit of time to figure it out I decided to document it for anyone trying to solve the same problem.

If you are curious about all that I went through and see references to upstream issues you can visit this issue. It’s a bit raw. Most important notes are in the first comment.

On Big Sur, if you try to install older versions of Python you will need to tell pyenv to patch the code. For instance, you can install Python 3.8.7 the typical way ( pyenv install 3.8.7 ), however, if you try to install 3.8.0, or earlier, you will have to patch the code before building Python.

pyenv install --patch 3.6.10 < \
  <(curl -sSL https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/8ea6353.patch\?full_index\=1)

If your pyenv version is lesser than 1.2.22 you will also need to specify LDFLAGS. You can read more about it here.

LDFLAGS="-L$(xcrun --show-sdk-path)/usr/lib ${LDFLAGS}" \
  pyenv install --patch 3.6.10 < \
  <(curl -sSL https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/8ea6353.patch\?full_index\=1)

It seems very simple, however, it took me a lot of work to figure it out. I hope I saved you some time!