Introduction

If you’re a Python developer, you’re probably familiar with pip and pip-tools, the go-to tools for managing Python packages. However, did you know that there’s a faster alternative that can save you time and improve your workflow?

Meet UV

uv is a package installer used for installing packages in python in a faster way. Which is written on Rust 🦀 , makes a warping speed in installation of packages as compared to pip and pip-tools.

Also, It is Free and Open Source done by astral-sh. which has around 11.3k stars on GitHub makes a very trending alternative package manager for python.

pip vs uv

As per astral-sh, they claim uv makes as very faster on installation of python packages, as compared to poetry , which is a another python package manager and pip-compile

Also, we can able to create a virtual environment, at a warping speed as compared to python3 venv or virtualenv.

My experience and Benchmarks

Nowadays, I am using uv as a package manager for doing my side projects. Which feels very good on developing python applications and it will be definitely useful on containerizing python applications using docker.

But now, uv has make my life easier with warping speed in installation on packages, suitable for building and deploying our containers as our need with many repitition and hassle-free in building docker containers.

Here is my comparison on pip and uv, Let’s start with pip

The above pic shows that it takes almost 3.84 or approximately 4 seconds to create a virtual environment in python whereas,

uv takes just 0.01 seconds to create a virtual environment in python. Now we move on with installing packages such as fastapi and langchain at same time, which has more dependencies than ever worked with.

pip install fastapi langchain

This takes around 22.5 seconds, which is fast today 😂, Sometimes which makes it even slower during installation at crucial time. Now let’s check with uv.

uv, makes a warping installation of langchain and fastapi at same time within 0.12 seconds. 🤯💥

Which makes me to use ‘uv’ as my package manager for python while developing my projects at recent times.

uv Installation and usage

Firstly copy the command for installation using linux,

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/releases/download/0.1.38/uv-installer.sh | sh

on Windows,

powershell -c "irm https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/releases/download/0.1.38/uv-installer.ps1 | iex"

for mac users, go and download official binaries provided by astral-sh, given here.

Virtual Environment creation

for creating virtual environments for python, we can use

uv venv <environment-name>

for <environment-name> give any name your wish.

Package Installation

for package Installation , we have to use

uv pip install <package-name>

Conclusion

Through this blog post, we have learned about uv package manager and how it is effective in making our python workflows faster and building our containers faster and ease of deployment .

To know about me, click on my github, Linkedin.

uv- A faster alternative to pip and pip-tools was originally published in Towards Dev on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.