115 points by harryvederci 3 days ago | 26 comments
quickslowdown 4 hours ago
I highly, highly recommend uv. It solves & installs dependencies incredibly fast, and the CLI is very intuitive once you've memorized a couple commands. It handles monorepos well with the "workspaces" concept, it can replace pipx with "uv tool install," handle building & publishing, and the docker image is great, you just add a FROM line to the top and copy the bin from /uv.

I've used 'em all, pip + virtualenv, conda (and all its variants), Poetry, PDM (my personal favorite before switching to uv). Uv handles everything I need in a way that makes it so I don't have to reach for other tools, or really even think about what uv is doing. It just works, and it works great.

I even use it for small scripts. You can run "uv init --script <script_name.py>" and then "uv add package1 package2 package3 --script <script_name.py>". This adds an oddly formatted comment to the top of the script and instructs uv which packages to install when you run it. The first time you run "uv run <script_name.py>," uv installs everything you need and executes the script. Subsequent executions use the cached dependencies so it starts immediately.

If you're going to ask me to pitch you on why it's better than your current preference, I'm not going to do that. Uv is very easy to install & test, I really recommend giving it a try on your next script or pet project!

scribu 2 hours ago
The install speed alone makes it worthwhile for me. It went from minutes to seconds.
BoorishBears 2 hours ago
I was working on a Raspberry Pi at a hackathon, and pip install was eating several minutes at a time.

Tried uv for the first time and it was down to seconds.

baby_souffle 3 hours ago
I didn't know that UV would now edit the script for you. That is just icing on the cake!

For the curious, the format is codified here: https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/

mcintyre1994 1 hour ago
That scripting trick is awesome! One of the really nice things about Elixir and its dependency manager is that you can just write Mix.install(…) in your script and it’ll fetch those dependencies for you, with the same caching you mentioned too.

Does uv work with Jupyter notebooks too? When I used it a while ago dependencies were really annoying compared to Livebook with that Mix.install support.

midhun1234 3 hours ago
Can confirm this is all true. I used to be the "why should I switch" guy. The productivity improvement from not context switching while pip installs a requirements file is completely worth it.
y1zhou 29 minutes ago
[dead]
IshKebab 3 hours ago
Uv really fixes Python. It takes it from "oh god I have to fight Python again" to "wow it was actually fast and easy".

I think all the other projects (pyenv, poetry, pip, etc.) should voluntarily retire for the good of Python. If everyone moved to Uv right now, Python would be in a far better place. I'm serious. (It's not going to happen though because the Python community has no taste.)

The only very minor issue I've had is once or twice the package cache invalidation hasn't worked correctly and `uv pip install` installed an outdated package until I `uv clean`ed. Not a big deal though considering it solves so many Python clusterfucks.

javchz 2 hours ago
Agree. I mostly do front end in my day job, and despite JavaScript being a bit of a mess lang, dealing with npm is way better than juggling anaconda, miniforge, Poetry, pip, venv, etc depending on the project.

UV is such a smooth UX that it makes you wonder how something like it wasn’t part of Python from the start.

kubav027 3 hours ago
I am pretty happy with poetry for near future. I prefer using python interpreters installed by linux package manager. In cloud I use python docker. Poetry recently added option to install python too if I changed my mind.

I have already setup CI/CD pipelines for programs and python libraries. Using uv would probably save some time on dependency updates but it would require changing my workflow and CI/CD. I do not think it is worth the time right now.

But if you use older environments without proper lock file I would recommend switching immediately. Poetry v2 supports pyproject.toml close to format used by uv so I can switch anytime when it would look more appealing.

Another thing to consider in long term is how astral tooling would change when they will need to make money.

js2 53 minutes ago
> I prefer using python interpreters installed by linux package manager.

uv will defer to any python it finds in PATH as long as it satisfies your version requirements (if any):

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/python-versions/

It also respects any virtual environment you've already created, so you can also do something like this:

   /usr/bin/python3 -m venv .venv
   .venv/bin/pip install uv
   .venv/bin/uv install -r requirements.txt # or
   .venv/bin/uv run script ...
It's a very flexible and well thought out tool and somehow it manages to do what I think it ought to do. I rarely need to go to its documentation.

> Using uv would probably save some time on dependency updates but it would require changing my workflow and CI/CD.

I found it very straightforward to switch to uv. It accommodates most existing workflows.

TheIronYuppie 50 minutes ago
For scripting... HIGHLY recommend putting your dependencies inline.

E.g.:

  #!/usr/bin/env python3
  # /// script
  # requires-python = ">=3.11"
  # dependencies = [
  #     "psycopg2-binary",
  #     "pyyaml",
  # ]
  # ///
Then -

  uv run -s file.py
kylecordes 2 hours ago
UV is such a big improvement that it moves Python from my "would use again if I had to, but would really not look forward to it" pile to my "happy to use this as needed" pile. Without disparaging the hard work by many that came before, UV shows just how much previous tools left unsolved.
vslira 3 hours ago
I'm using exclusively uv for personal projects - and small prototypes at work - and I can't recommend it enough.

Uv makes python go from "batteries included" to "attached to a nuclear reactor"

runjake 39 minutes ago
For my use cases, uv is so frictionless it has effectively made Python tolerable for me. I primarily discovered it via Simon Willison's (@simonw) blog posts[1]. I recommend his blog highly.

1. https://simonwillison.net/tags/uv/

stuaxo 12 minutes ago
This makes sense for people keen on pyenv.

I'm still very keen on virtualenvwrapper, I hope that the fast dependency resolution and install of uv can come there and to poetry.

tomrod 2 hours ago
I love using it. I'm concerned that they go the route of Terraform and put in play pricing and values that differ from what their users support.
mrbonner 2 hours ago
Ans you can now install Python and set it to the default in your path with the --default flag. Big plus for me to replace pyenv finally.
thefreeman 1 hour ago
finally! this was the thing keeping me from switching every time i looked into it.
eikenberry 3 hours ago
Maybe this one will finally be adopted as the official package manager for Python? Only 20 years late, but it would be a nice development.
0cf8612b2e1e 2 hours ago
Pfft. Pull the other one. The PSF hates the idea of dealing with something so icky.

I have been pretty pleased with uv, but I am continually worried about the funding model. What happens when the VC starts demanding a return?

__MatrixMan__ 11 minutes ago
We fork it. Whatever carrot the VC's dangle can be chased by the handful who care, and the rest of us can continue using the important part.
unsnap_biceps 4 hours ago
Uv in script mode has made me love python again.
rsyring 4 hours ago
15 year Python dev who usually adopts tooling slowly. Just do it, uv's absolutely worth it.

I also use mise with it, which is a great combination and gives you automatic venv activation among other things.

See, among other mise docs related to Python, https://mise.jdx.dev/mise-cookbook/python.html

See also a Python project template I maintain built on mise + uv: https://github.com/level12/coppy

jdxcode 3 hours ago
ideally mise could be replaced entirely by uv or at least just be a thin wrapper around uv (in some ways that's already the case), but given this article requires the use of the custom uv-python-symlink utility it seems uv isn't quite there yet
rsyring 2 hours ago
Mise does way more than uv, it's a much larger scope than just Python tooling.

I think the current status quo, that of mise utilizing uv for it's Python integration support, makes sense and I don't see that changing.

Also, FWIW, mise has other methods for Python integration support, e.g. pyenv, virtualenv, etc.

Edit:

Ha... Didn't realize who I was replying to. Don't need me to tell you anything about mise. I apparently misinterpreted your comment.

jdxcode 2 hours ago
the reality that I'm sure you've heard me say many times is that I'm just not a python dev and astral is likely always going to build a better solution around python than I ever could. They've just focused a lot more on the package manager side of things than the runtime/venv management side so far but I suspect that will change—and given astral's velocity I doubt we'll be waiting long

and btw mise's venv support isn't going anywhere probably ever, but I do hope that at some point we could either let uv do the heavy lifting internally or point users to uv as a better solution

NeutralForest 4 hours ago
I used to install Python through mise but now I just use uv tbh.
rsyring 4 hours ago
Similar. But we get other benefits through mise, like tasks and other tool installs (e.g. Terraform). So we still use them together.
NeutralForest 4 hours ago
That's fair, it's also nice if you have a backend in Python and a frontend in JS since mise also handles node.
rsyring 4 hours ago
Forgot about that! Yes, another significant benefit of why we use mise.

In particular, we use flask-vite and it's so nice to be able to have the right version of Node specified in the same management system as we specify the Python version. This solved a not insignificant amount of angst around FE development for me personally since I spend most of my time in the BE.

It's not like it was insurmountable before. But now, with mise, it's in that "just works" category for me.

NeutralForest 3 hours ago
100% agreed, it just takes a task that was a 10-15min setup depending on your environment and personal knowledge to a 2min thing. It just makes life easier and it puts the bar for starting lower, a win in my book =)
ashvardanian 2 hours ago
I’m enjoying UV a lot as well. If anyone from the Astral team sees this, I’d love to request more functionality or examples around packaging native libraries.

At this point, just thinking about updating CIBuildWheel images triggers PTSD—the GitHub CI pipelines become unbearably slow, even for raw CPython bindings that don’t require LibC or PyBind11. It’s especially frustrating because Python is arguably the ultimate glue language for native libraries. If Astral’s tooling could streamline this part of the workflow, I think we’d see a significant boost in the pace of both development & adoption for native and hardware-accelerated tools.

o10449366 1 hour ago
If uv figures out a way to capture the scientific community by adding support for conda-forge that'll be the killshot for other similar projects, imo. Pixi is too half-baked currently and suffers from some questionable design decisions.
lmeyerov 1 hour ago
Are people seeing it work well in GPU/pydata land and creating multiplatform docker images?

In the data science world, conda/mamba was needed because of this kind of thing, but a lot of room for improvement. We basically want lockfile, incremental+fast builds, and multi-arch for these tricky deps.

throwaway314155 14 minutes ago
Works better than poetry for cuda-versioned pytorch. I don't have overlap with your other domains unfortunately (ML, not data science).
bnycum 4 hours ago
I decided to give uv a shot on my new machine over pyenv and I've been enjoying it. Just last week I had to generate out 90 slides from some data last minute. Quickly created a project added in my dependencies (pandas, matplotlib, python-pptx), then crunched out some code. Absolutely zero friction with a much easier to use set of commands in my opinion.
xucian 3 days ago
has anybody doing complex projects achiever success with uv completely replacing pyenv, and had mostly pros and few or no cons?

I'm very comfortable with pyenv, but am extremely open to new stuff

__mharrison__ 1 hour ago
Teaching a course for a corporate client this week for data scientists. The first day (of five) we covered uv. Minds blown.

"Course was worth it just for uv"

NeutralForest 4 hours ago
Sure, I've basically replaced pyenv, pyenv-virtualenv, poetry; with uv. I can't think about cons personally, though you might need to dig into the docs at times.
emgeee 4 hours ago
I've used uv to work on the feast feature store project to great success
rat87 4 hours ago
I don't know how complex your project is but I moved my previous work from pyenv to rye(UV and rye have merged, most work is being done on uv, today I'd probably use UV)

And am currently trying to move current work to UV. The problems seem to be possibility of unknown breakage for unknown users of the old project not any known technical issue.

I'd highly reccomend UV. Its just easier/more flexible. And it downloads third party pre compiled python builds instead of the extra time and complexity to get it compiling locally. Its much nicer especially when maintaing an environment for a team that just works without them having to know about it

One downside of UV is that unlike pyenv and rye it doesn't shim python. Pyenv shim did give me some trouble but rye simples shim didn't. The workaround is to run stuff with uv run x.py instead of python x.py

ath3nd 4 hours ago
I worked in a large-ish org where 20+ python projects, their CI/CD pipelines and their docker images were migrated from `pyenv` + `.python-version` + `requirements.txt` to `uv` in basically a single day.

If you are comfortable with `pyenv`, the switch to `uv` is basically a walk in the park. The benefit is the speed + the predictable dependencies resolution.

moltar 3 hours ago
I wasn’t able to figure how to make a uv installed python version a global when “python” is called, at least in the current shell, as I need it in CI.
kstrauser 2 hours ago
That feature's in preview now. You can run it like:

  uv python install --preview --default 3.13
and then you get Python 3.13 whenever you run `python` outside of an environment that declares something else.
leejoramo 2 hours ago
This is great news. I had hacked together some bash and fish scripts to mostly do this but they still had some rough edges. I missed that uv now had this ready for preview
kstrauser 2 hours ago
I just found that a couple weeks ago.

I'm an end user, too. I don't have anything to do with uv development. I stumbled across it in a GitHub issue or something and passed along the info.

moltar 2 hours ago
Thank you!! Will try it tomorrow.
kstrauser 2 hours ago
You bet. I was so happy to find that!
OutOfHere 3 hours ago
The functionalities of three tooling projects, namely uv, ruff (linter), and pyright (type checker) need to merge and become mandatory for new Python projects. Together they will bring some limited sanity to Python.
wiseowise 2 hours ago
Ruff is already integrated into uv and Astral are working on type checker.
2 hours ago
__mharrison__ 1 hour ago
What benefit does merging provide?
OutOfHere 1 hour ago
In an ideal world they shouldn't have to, but in the real world, it makes it easier for enterprises to adopt without friction. Adopting three tools is a threefold bigger challenge in enterprises, but thinking about it as a single tool makes it more amenable to enterprise adoption where it's needed the most. The merging I suggest is only logical, more like a bundling.
__mharrison__ 50 minutes ago
Hmmm, I've never seen that and I feel like I work with some pretty locked down companies.
theogravity 4 hours ago
Is there a guide for how to use uv if you're a JS dev coming from pnpm?

I just want to create a monorepo with python that's purely for making libraries (no server / apps).

And is it normal to have a venv for each library package you're building in a uv monorepo?

BiteCode_dev 4 hours ago
If the libraries are meant to be used together, you can get away with one venv. If they should be decoupled, then one venv per lib is better.

There is not much to know:

- uv python install <version> if you want a particular version of python to be installed

- uv init --vcs none [--python <version>] in each directory to initialize the python project

- uv add [--dev] to add libraries to your venv

- uv run <cmd> when you want to run a command in the venv

That's it, really. Any bonus can be learned later.

NeutralForest 4 hours ago
There's also workspaces (https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/workspaces/) if you have common deps and it's possible to act on a specific member of the workspace as well.
BiteCode_dev 4 hours ago
That's one of the bonus I was thinking about. It's nice if you have a subset of deps you want to share, or if one dep is actually part of the monorepo, but it does require more to know.
theogravity 38 minutes ago
Thanks. Why is the notion of run and tool separate? Coming from JS, we have the package.json#scripts field and everything executes via a `pnpm run <script name>` command.
new_user_final 2 hours ago
uv sync if you clone a github repo
BiteCode_dev 2 hours ago
uv run in the freshly cloned repo will create the venv and install all deps automatically.

You can even use --extra and --group with uv run like with uv sync. But in a monorepo, those are rare to use.

theogravity 40 minutes ago
Thanks for the info.

I looked at the group documentation, but it's not clear to me why I would want to use it, or where I would use it:

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/concepts/projects/layout/#default-...

(I'm a JS dev who has to write a set of python packages in a monorepo.)

oblio 3 hours ago
How does this compare to Mise: https://mise.jdx.dev/lang/python.html ?
claytonjy 2 hours ago
mise is higher level. i use it to install uv in projects with other non-python dependencies (helm, terraform, npm), which i also install with mise.

Then all the python dependencies are managed with uv.

For a non-python project which needs a python-based CLI tool, i’m not sure if i’d use mise or uv (uvx).

BiteCode_dev 3 hours ago
Note that despite the title, the author is not switching from pyenv to uv, but from pip, pyenv, pipx, pip-tools, and pipdeptree to uv, because uv does much more than pyenv alone.

It replaces a whole stack, and does each feature better, faster, with fewer modes of failure.

surfingdino 1 hour ago
So... I am switching a project from pip to uv. I am hoping for things to be "better", but so far it's been a bit of a familiar "why does it not work as described?" journey.
jgalt212 1 hour ago
Because pyenv compiles from source, it's optimized for your own platform. In practice, are these performance differences noticeable?
rullopat 4 hours ago
Why in the Python ecosystem you change package manager every 2 week?!? What’s wrong with you pythonist people?!?
affinepplan 1 hour ago
uv is worth changing to. it legitimately solves python packaging problems the way no other proposed solution thus far could.
alexjplant 3 hours ago
You're being downvoted (for snark presumably) but you have a point.

During my tenures as a Python developer I've had to deal with pip, pipx, venv, pipenv, setuptools, conda, and poetry. I'd not heard of pyenv or uv until this thread (or maybe I've touched pyenv and got it confused with one of the 7 other tools I mentioned) and I'm sure there are other dependency/environment management tools floating around that I missed.

Now that I'm back to Go it's `go get` with some mise tasks. It's a serious breath of fresh air. The Python ecosystem probably won't ever catch up to npm when it comes to cranking out shiny new things but it's definitely more bleeding edge than a lot of other languages.

turtlebits 2 hours ago
In the past 10 years, virtualenv and pip have been perfectly fine for me. They still are. I ignored any new tooling.

uv is great so far, I did run into a hiccup where moving from pip with a requirements.txt file to uv slowed a CI pipeline way down that I had to revert.

__mharrison__ 1 hour ago
Odd that it slowed down. I wondered what happened. For me and my clients, uv has been 2-4 orders of magnitude faster.
rat87 1 hour ago
The reason there have been so many is because the standard included tools (pip, venv) are not great. And others could still use improvements.

Venv and setup tools aren't really package managers. Pipx is only meant for installing Dev tools per user (in isolated Venvs).

pyenv does something a bit different from those tools you listed(maybe it'd part of cones I haven't tried it). Its not a dependency manager its a python version manager like nvm (node version manager). It helps you manage downloading and compiling python from source and it let's you specify python version in a .python-version file and provides a shim to find the right python for a project(compiling it if its not already available).

I tried pipenv and despite being hyped for it, it had a lot of issues. Then I tried poetry which seemed much better but was still sort of slow and got stuck updating lock files sometimes.

I haven't even tried pdm. Or various conda package managers since its mainly used by scientists with lots of binary dependency needs.

Then ~~uv~~ rye came along and seemed to fix things. It replaced pip+pip tools/pipenv/poetry. Also replaced pipx(install python tools in isolated venvs then add it to users ./local/bin). Also replaced pyenv but instead of compiling python which takes a while and can be troublesome it downloads portable builds https://astral.sh/blog/python-build-standalone (which do have some downsides/compatibility issues but are usually better then compiling python). It was also written in rust so avoided circular venv issues that sometimes come with installing python packages since it had a self contained binary(plus some shims).

Then UV came along, the projects merged and most development is happening in uv. Despite the rye-> switch most things are pretty similar and I feel a lot of excitement towards it. The one big difference is there's no shims to automatically call the right python for a project from UV. Instead you need to run uv run script.py

Astral the guys behind UV took over the independent python builds and have also built the most popular python formater/linter these days - ruff (also written in rust, also fast they're also looking into adding a better type checker for python type hints).

I'd reccomend trying it for your next project I think it could become the defacto packaging/version tool for python

fwip 3 hours ago
I think you might have your dates confused. Pyenv was first released about 8 years ago.