What is UV?
An extremely fast Python all in one package manager written in Rust. It replaces the following tools and is extremely fast.
- pip
- pip-tools
- pipx
- poetry
- pyenv
- virtualenv
Its one tool to rule them all.
Install UV
Mac and Linux
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
windows
powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
Via Python
pip install uv
Manually installing Python version using UV
To download a python versions. This installs python which can be used by uv project and does not mess up your global python
uv python install 3.12
To see all installed version of python by uv
uv python list --only-installed
This step is optional but gives user the flexibility to install any version of python they need.
Initializing UV
To start we initialize a project with init
# if you have a project folder created
uv init
This creates apyproject.toml the new standard for building python application. Read more Writing your pyproject.toml
[project]
name = "my_python_poject"
version = "0.1.0"
description = "Add your description here"
readme = "README.md"
requires-python = ">=3.13"
dependencies = []
and a. .python-version which specifies the version of python for this project.
You can also init by specifying the python version and project name.
here python version is 3.13 and project name is my_python_poject
uv init --python 3.13 my_python_poject
Creating a virtual env
UV by default will activate the virtual env when called using uv run however if we want to create one before we can use
uv venv
Create a venv with required version
uv venv --python 3.13
The venv needs to be manually activated if we are not using uv
source .venv/bin/activate # linux or mac
source .venv\Scripts\activate # windows
Installing and removing dependencies
Installing Dependencies
To install package uv downloads and ensures no conflict and add it to pyproject.toml
uv add pytest requests
your pyproject.toml will look like below post add
[project]
name = "my_python_poject"
version = "0.1.0"
description = "Add your description here"
readme = "README.md"
requires-python = ">=3.13"
dependencies = [
"pytest>=8.3.4",
"requests>=2.32.3",
]
if you have a requirements.txt then
uv add -r requirements.txt
The below also works but I prefer the uv add command
uv pip install -r requirements.txt
You can also add dependencies directly to pyproject.toml then run this will also sync any dev dependencies
We can add dev dependencies like linter or formatter by passing the group name here it is dev
uv add --dev ruff
Uninstalling Dependencies
uv remove pytest
or delete the particular package from pyproject.toml and run uv sync
List all dependencies installed
To see all package and its dependencies
uv tree
Sync dependencies to other
Once a project is created using uv and packages installed. uv creates a uv.lock this should be synced with git
If someone clones your repo they can get an exact replica of your environment including the python version by running the below command
uv sync
To sync other dependencies except dev dependencies
uv sync --no-group dev
Running program with uv
To run a program use uv run this activates the virtual env and runs the program
uv run main.py
Sharing code snippets
At times we may have a small program we want to share but this need python to be installed and the required packages uv solves this using --with
As long as uv is installed and the dependencies are mentioned in --with uv will create the virtual env and install the dependencies and run the code.
uv run --with requests demo.py
or we can add incline scripts by adding below code for script we do not need --with mentioned here
# /// script
# requires-python = ">=3.12"
# dependencies = [
# "requests",
# ]
# ///
import requests
result = requests.get("https://www.google.com")
print(result.status_code)
uv run google_status.py
A shortcut to add script automatically by uv is to use the --script keyword and pass the required dependencies after the script
uv add --script demo.py 'requests'