How do you install `poetry shell` on macOS?

[whitfieldsdad]

I'm not sure what I've done, but, I can't manage to get poetry shell to work - poetry env activate works, though:

poetry was installed using pipx:

brew uninstall poetry
brew install pipx
pipx install poetry

Trying to spawn and activate a virtualenv with poetry shell fails:

poetry shell

Looks like you're trying to use a Poetry command that is not available.

Since Poetry (2.0.0), the shell command is not installed by default. You can use,

  - the new env activate command (recommended); or
  - the shell plugin to install the shell command

Documentation: https://python-poetry.org/docs/managing-environments/#activating-the-environment

Note that the env activate command is not a direct replacement for shell command.

But, poetry env activate works.

I'm not sure how I broke my setup, but, does anyone know what the issue might be, or if I should just use poetry env activate rather than poetry shell?

[Rohianon]

You're not alone—this issue stems from a change in Poetry 2.0. The poetry shell command is no longer included by default in Poetry 2.0+ unless you install the shell plugin. Instead, poetry env activate is now the recommended way to activate a virtual environment.

See the same link as the documentation

Why is poetry shell Missing?

In Poetry 2.0+, the shell command is not installed by default. Instead, you are encouraged to use:

poetry env activate

If you really want poetry shell back, you need to install the shell plugin:

poetry self add poetry-plugin-shell

[pawelkoston]

It is not working for me on macOS, the plugin fails to install:

[~]$ poetry self add poetry-plugin-shell
Using version ^1.0.1 for poetry-plugin-shell

Updating dependencies
Resolving dependencies... (0.1s)

Package operations: 3 installs, 22 updates, 0 removals

  - Downgrading certifi (2025.11.12 -> 2025.6.15)
  - Downgrading anyio (4.11.0 -> 4.9.0): Failed

poetry env activate, does also not work for me:

*[yyyy][~/xxxx]$ poetry env activate
source /Users/xxx/.venv/bin/activate
*[yyyy][~/xxxx]$ pip
zsh: command not found: pip

Prefixing each command with poetry run is to much pain. Downgraded to 1.8.5.

[k-gruenberg]

You should really resolve this issue on macOS. Neither poetry shell nor poetry env activate nor poetry self add poetry-plugin-shell is working.

[kenttonino]

What works for me, is installing both the poetry and poetry-plugin-shell using pip.

pip install poetry
pip install poetry-plugin-shell

Then run right away,

poetry shell --no-cache --directory=projects/<project-name>