Technology Tales

Fixing Python path issues after Homebrew updates on Linux Mint

Published on 30^th August 2025 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

With Python available by default, it is worth asking how the version on my main Linux workstation is made available courtesy of Homebrew. All that I suggest is that it either was needed by something else or I fancied having a newer version that was available through the Linux Mint repos. Regardless of the now vague reason for doing so, it meant that I had some work to do after running the following command to update and upgrade all my Homebrew packages:

brew update; brew upgrade

The first result was this message when I tried running a Python script afterwards:

-bash: /home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin/python3: No such file or directory

The solution was to issue the following command to re-link Python:

brew link --overwrite python@3.13

Since you may have a different version by the time that you read this, just change 3.13 above to whatever you have on your system. All was not quite sorted for me after that, though.

My next task was to make Pylance look in the right place for Python packages because they had been moved too. Initial inquiries were suggesting complex if robust solutions. Instead, I went for a simpler fix. The first step was to navigate to File > Preferences > Settings in the menus. Then, I sought out the Open Settings (JSON) icon in the top right of the interface and clicked on it to open a JSON containing VSCode settings. Once in there, I edited the file to end up with something like this:

    "python.analysis.extraPaths": [
        "/home/[account name]/.local/bin",
        "/home/[account name]/.local/lib/python[python version]/site-packages"
    ]

Clearly, your [account name] and [python version] need to be filled in above. That approach works for me so far, leaving the more complex alternative for later should I come to need that.