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Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

emily.space

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Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#121

Post by maccard »

kardos wrote: post #46
LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

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.

> uv will magically install and use the specified modules. As long as you have internet access, and whatever repository it's drawing from is online, and you may get different version of python each time, ...

If I download python project from someone on the same network as me and they have it written in a different python version to me and a requirements.txt I need all those things anyway.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#124

Post by moleperson »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

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.

Why is the ‘-S’ argument to ‘env’ needed? Based on the man page it doesn’t appear to be doing anything useful here, and in practice it doesn’t either.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#125

Post by p_l »

d4mi3n wrote: post #42
LeoPanthera wrote: post #18

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.

If I were to put on my security hat, things like this give me shivers. It's one thing if you control the script and specified the dependencies. For any other use-case, you're trusting the script author to not install python dependencies that could be hiding all manner of defects or malicious intent. This isn't a knock against UV, but more a criticism of dynamic dependency resolution. I'd feel much better about this i…

uv can still be redirected to private PyPi mirror, which should be mandatory from security and reliability perspective anyway.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#126

Post by zacmps »

jampekka wrote: post #22
verdverm wrote: post #11

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

Type annotations were introduced in 2008 and even type hints over decade ago in Sept 2015.

But there has been continual improvement over that time, both in the ecosystem, and in the language (like a syntax for generics).

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#127

Post by BoredPositron »

whimsicalism wrote: post #97
dekhn wrote: post #58

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 to…

I work professionally in ML and have not had to touch conda in the last 7 years. In an ML cluster, it is hopefully containerized and there is no need for that?

It's still used in edu and research. Haven't seen it in working environments in quite some time as well.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#128

Post by maccard »

runningmike wrote: post #19

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….

You say this on a message board run by a VC about a programming language that is primarily developed by meta, google and co.

uv is MIT licensed so if they rug pull, you can fork.

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#129

Post by dragonwriter »

eatonphil wrote: post #74
kyt wrote: post #21

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 enviro…

> 2. You end up needing to use `uv pip` so it's not even a full replacement for pip. Needing pip and virtualenvs was enough to make me realize uv wasn't what I was looking for. If I still need to manage virtualenvs and call pip I'm just going to do so with both of these directly. I had been hoping someone would introduce the non-virtualenv package management solution that every single other language has where there's…

> I had been hoping someone would introduce the non-virtualenv package management solution that every single other language has where there's a dependency list and version requirements (including of the language itself) in a manifest file (go.mod, package.json, etc) and everything happens in the context of that directory alone without shell shenanigans.

If you are using uv, you don’t need to do shell shenanigans, you just use uv run. So I'm not sure how uv with pyproject.toml doesn't meet this description (yes, the venv is still there, it is used exactly as you describe.)

Re: Uv is the best thing to happen to the Python ecosystem in a decade

#130

Post by WorldMaker »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #48
hollow-moe wrote: post #15

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.

While I do share the sentiment, I firmly believe that for opensource, no one should require the author to distribute their software, or even ask them to provide os-specific installation methods. They wrote it for free, use it or don't. They provide a handy install script - don't like it? sure, grab the source and build it yourself. Oops, you don't know what the software does? Gotta read every line of it, right? Maybe…

For small project open source with a CLI audience, why bother with an install script at all and not just provide tarballs/ZIP files and assume that the CLI audience is smart enough to untarball/unzip it to somewhere on their PATH?

Also, many of the "distribution" tools like brew, scoop, winget, and more are just "PR a YAML file with your zip file URL, name of your EXE to add to a PATH, and a checksum hash of the zip to this git repository". We're about at a minimum effort needed to generate a "distribution" point in software history, so seems interesting shell scripts to install things seem to have picked up instead.

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