Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade (emily.space)

Idk, for me ruff was more of a game changer. No more explaining why we need both flake8 and pylint (and isort), no more flake8 plugins... Just one command that does it all.

UV is great but I use it as a more convenient pip+venv. Maybe I'm not using it to it's full potential.

A very accessible and gentle introduction for the scientific set who may still be largely stuck on Conda. I liked it!

Another Python package manager? How many are there now?

Venv seems pretty straightforward once you’ve learned the one activate command.

I don’t really get that uv solves all these problems ve never encountered. Just make a venv and use it seems to work fine.

As someone who generally prefers not to use python in a production context (I think it's excellent for one-off scripts or cron jobs that require more features then what bash provides), I agree with this sentiment. I recently wrote some python (using uv) and found it to be pleasant and well-integrated with a variety of LSPs.

The best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem would be something that unites pip and conda. Conda is not going anywhere given how many packages depend on non-python binaries, especially in enterprise settings.

I'd put type annotations and GIL removal above UV without a second thought. UV is still young and I hit some of those growing pains. While it is very nice, I'm not going to put it up there with sliced bread, it's just another package manager among many

curl|sh and iwr|iex chills my spine, no one should recommend these methods of installation in 2025. I'm against closed computers but I'm also against reckless install. Even without the security concerns these way of installation tends to put files in a whole random places making it hard to manage and cleanup.

For single-file Python scripts, which 99% of mine seem to be, you can simplify your life immensely by just putting this at the top of the script:

  #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --script
  # /// script
  # requires-python = ">=3.11"
  # dependencies = [ "modules", "here" ]
  # ///

The script now works like a standalone executable, and uv will magically install and use the specified modules.

Seems like a commercial blog. And imho hatch is better from a Foss perspective.

UV means getting more strings attached with VC funded companies and leaning on their infrastructure. This is a high risk for any FOSS community and history tells us how this ends….

I must be the odd man out but I am not a fan of uv.

1. It tries to do too many things. Please just do one thing and do it well. It's simultaneously trying to replace pip, pyenv, virtualenv, and ruff in one command.

2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip.

3. It does not play well with Docker.

4. It adds more complexity. You end up needing to understand all of these new environmental variables: `UV_TOOL_BIN_DIR`, `UV_SYSTEM_PYTHON`, `UV_LINK_MODE`, etc.

I'm surprised by how much I prefer prepending "uv" to everything instead of activating environments - which is still naturally an option if that's what floats your boat.

I also like how you can manage Python versions very easily with it. Everything feels very "batteries-included" and yet local to the project.

I still haven't used it long enough to tell whether it avoids the inevitable bi-yearly "debug a Python environment day" but it's shown enough promise to adopt it as a standard in all my new projects.

These rust based tools really change the idea of what's possible (when you can get feedback in milliseconds). But I'm trying to figure out what Astral as a company does for revenue. I don't see any paid products on their website. They even have investors.

So far it seems like they have a bunch of these high performance tools. Is this part of an upcoming product suite for python or something? Just curious. I'm not a full-time python developer.

Genuinely trying to learn here - what's the major advantage of using uv over conda?

(Transparently, I'm posting this before I've completed the article.)

Can't agree more. We were using pyenv+poetry before and regularly had to pin our poetry version to a specific one, because new poetry releases would stall trying to resolve dependencies.

pyenv was problematic because you needed the right concoction of system packages to ensure it compiled python with the right features, and we have a mix of MacOS and Linux devs so this was often non-trivial.

uv is much faster than both of these tools, has a more ergonomic CLI, and solves both of the issues I just mentioned.

I'm hoping astral's type checker is suitably good once released, because we're on mypy right now and it's a constant source of frustration (slow and buggy).

I find the python tooling so confusing now. There’s pip, virtualenv, pipx, uv, probably half a dozen others I’m missing. I like node, npm isolates by default, npx is easy to understand, and the ecosystem is much less fragmented. I see a python app on GitHub and they’re all listing different package management tools. Reminds me of that competing standards xkcd.

Everything from the astral team has been superb, I don't want to use Python without ruff & uv. Yet to try "ty", anyone used it?

There is something hilarious about using a project/package manager written in another language.

I am still learning and I have the same feeling as someone who don't consider myself good with python. At least I can keep my venv in control now is all I can feel with Uv approach.

I don't like that it defaults to putting the virtual environment right there, I much prefer how pipenv does it with a shared one in the users home directory, but it's a small price to pay for how fast it is.

I hadn't paid any attention to rust before uv, but since starting to use uv, I've switched a lot of my performance-sensitive code dev to rust (with interfaces to python). These sorts of improvements really do improve my quality of life significantly.

My hope is that conda goes away completely. I run an ML cluster and we have multi-gigabyte conda directories and researchers who can't reproduce anything because just touching an env breaks the world.

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I think ruff is the best thing to happen to the python ecosystem in a decade, it really sold the entire community on the difference fast native tooling could make.

Wait until they fully embrace the benefits of strong typing :)

I have one problem with uv as of now, and it's more of an annoyance. It doesn't seem to understand the concept of >= when it's trying to resolve a local wheel I built and use. If I have 6.4.1 published on GitLab and the pyproject says $WHEEL_NAME>=6.2.0, it still goes to look for 6.2.0 (which I deleted) and errors out.