Brighter But Not Harmful: The 'uv' Python Installer

The Effective and Unobtrusive ‘uv’ Python Package Manager

I really like ‘uv’. I know controversial opinion, but I am not afraid of what the bureaucrats in city hall will say. I never really felt like dependencies took too long to download. But when I saw uv in action, I mourned the collective hours of all the python users who had the misfortune of coding before ‘uv’, a new, blazing-fast Python package installer and resolver from Astral, the creators of the Ruff linter. It’s designed to be a drop-in replacement for common pip and pip-tools workflows, but significantly faster.

Why is uv a Big Deal?

• Speed: This is uv’s headline feature. It’s written in Rust and leverages parallelism and smart caching to install and resolve dependencies much quicker than traditional tools. For large projects or CI/CD pipelines, this can mean saving substantial amounts of time.

• Drop-in Replacement (Mostly): uv aims to be compatible with existing requirements.txt files and pyproject.toml standards. You can often use uv pip install … much like you would pip install ….

• Unified Tooling: It can act as both a package installer (like pip) and a resolver for pinning dependencies (like pip-compile from pip-tools). It also includes capabilities for managing virtual environments.

• Modern Foundation: Built with performance and correctness in mind from the ground up.

What Can You Do With uv?

• uv pip install -r requirements.txt: Install dependencies from a requirements file, but faster.

• uv pip compile pyproject.toml -o requirements.txt: Resolve dependencies and generate a locked requirements.txt file.

• uv venv: Create virtual environments quickly.

Sometimes you think the world is going in the wrong direction. And then you see something like uv and you think, maybe it is not so bad after all.

Here are the docs if you want to learn more: uv docs.