uv - the new hope?

I'm genuinely excited about uv, a new package manager and more for Python, from the creators and maintainers of ruff. uv started as a pip alternative and has now expanded to become closer to their aspiration of being Cargo (the Rust package manger) for Python.

Firstly, what excites me about uv is it has the potential to be one tool that replaces many. It has functionality to be an alternative to pip, poetry, pipx and pyenv.

Secondly, the speed of uv is incredible.

Last, and by no means least, what excites me is the workflows behind certain commands. For example:

• If you have a uv project e.g. you have run uv init, then adding a dependency will auto create a virtual env if one does not already exist, activate it and install the dependency into it. All this by running uv add {pkg}.
• If you invoke your script or app with uv run e.g. uv run main.py then uv will check the lockfile and virtualenv are consistent and run your Python code in the activated virtual env.

I think abstracting away the virtualenv like this can be really helpful to Python beginners. And I will really enjoy not having to remember some additional steps when trying to get something done.

All my personal Python projects will use uv from now on. I really hope it catches on and becomes the Python package manager.