Making Python Fun Again

The big pain of Python is dependency management — it’s slow, complicated, and no clear best approach to do it.

There is a new tool called uv that is a drop-in replacement for pip-tools that is super fast.

Here is a simple shell script that demonstrates how to use it!

Shell Script

I named this shell script py.

#!/bin/bash

set -e

[ -f "pyproject.toml" ] || (
    echo "Expected pyproject.toml"
    exit 1
)

[ -d ".venv" ] || (
    echo "Creating virtual environment"
    python3 -m venv .venv
    .venv/bin/python3 -m pip install uv
)

[ "requirements.txt" -nt "pyproject.toml" ] || (
    echo "Updating requirements.txt"
    .venv/bin/uv pip compile -q --all-extras --generate-hashes pyproject.toml -o requirements.txt
)

[ ".venv/installed_requirements.txt" -nt "requirements.txt" ] || (
    echo "Updating environment"
    .venv/bin/uv pip sync requirements.txt
    cp requirements.txt .venv/installed_requirements.txt
)

CMD=$1
shift
exec ".venv/bin/${CMD}" "$@"

Starter pyproject.toml

A minimal pyproject.toml can be as follows

[project]
name = "test-project"
dependencies = [
    "pandas",
]

Try it out

Try using Pandas by calling py python3 then calling import pandas .

Now you want a new package? Add it in. For example, add rich into pyproject.toml. And run py python3 again and you’ll have it.

Conclusion

I hope this inspires some ideas of how to leverage uv.