CentOS 8 does not include a command that responds to python! Here are some solutions to this!

There are some good reasons why CentOS8 does not include python (as opposed to python2 or python3), and I especially like the fact that it makes you ensure you use the appropriate version. For a lengthier discussion, this RedHat blog post goes into details and is worth a read.

However, a lot of programs invoke python with a command like #!/usr/bin/env python and those break without a python. There are a couple of solutions depending on your level of access.

If you have root access

I don’t recommend doing this, because it sets a default python for everyone and negates exactly what the developers were trying to accomplish by eliminating the python command as detailed in the above blog post. However, a system-wide solution is to update-alternatives via either of these two commands:

update-alternatives --config python

This will provide you with a list of python commands and you can choose the one that you want to set as appropriate.

or

alternatives --set python /usr/bin/python3

This will explicitly set the version.

Note that you need root access for this, and although supposedly there are approaches to make this work on a per-user basis, I could not get that to work.

If you do not have root

The best way to do this is to create a symlink to a python somewhere in your PATH environment, especially near the end (since PATH is processed from left to right), although that probably doesn’t matter.

I put it either in $HOME/bin or $HOME/opt/bin depending on exactly how I have things set up:

cd $HOME/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/python3 python

this should now give you a working python command.