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title, excerpt, draft, nav_exclude
| title | excerpt | draft | nav_exclude |
|---|---|---|---|
| Using uv as an installer | Reliably packaging & distributing python CLI tools is hard. Dev uses uv in novel ways to make it easy to install the dev CLI, its dependencies and python 3.12. All in an isolated env. | false | true |
{% if page.date %}
{{ page.date | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}
{% endif %}Using uv as an installer
{: .no_toc }
It's hard to reliably package and distribute python command line tools to end users. Users frequently encounter challenges: dependency version conflicts, virtual environment management, needing to install python or a specific version of python, etc.
Dev employs uv in a couple of novel ways to streamline the installation process:
-
Install dev with
curl https://dev.chat/install.sh | sheven if python isn't already installed. -
Users who have python 3.8+ installed can
pip install dev-install && dev-install.
Both methods use uv to globally install the dev command line program,
with all of its dependencies in an isolated environment.
They ensure that dev will run with python 3.12, and install that version
if it is not already available.
These uv install methods are especially helpful for dev, because it has a large set of very specific dependencies. Since not all of dev's dependencies are available on all python versions, it requires python 3.9-3.12.
Most users don't want to worry about these details -- they just want a quick way to install and run dev.
One-liners
Users can install dev with a shell one-liner, without even having python previously installed:
curl -LsSf https://dev.chat/install.sh | sh
This installs uv, then uses it to install python 3.12,
install the dev command line tool
and update the user's shell path.
Under the hood, it is simply a copy of
uv's own install script https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh
with one line added, to install dev as a tool:
ensure "${_install_dir}/uv" tool install --force --python python3.12 dev-chat@latest
dev-install
The dev-install python package allows quick global installation of dev
for users who already have python 3.8+ installed.
It simply provides the dev-install command line program,
which users just need to run once.
pip install dev-install
dev-install
The pip install dev-install installs only two packages:
dev-install and the uv python package.
This ensures that uv is available
in the user's environment.
Everything else is installed in a stand-alone environment created by uv.
When the user runs dev-install, it runs uv
to install dev as a tool and update the user's shell path if needed:
uv tool install --force --python python3.12 dev-chat
uv tool update-shell
Benefits
These uv install methods have been popular with users, providing a hassle free way to install dev and quickly get started. Installs are also extremely fast, much faster than pip or pipx installs even when uv is also installing python 3.12!
There are also a number of benefits from the perspective of the tool developer/publisher.
Since providing these install methods, far fewer users report dependency problems and
version conflicts as compared to users who pip install dev-chat.
There is also less pressure to rapidly support the newest python versions,
since dev always installs with python 3.12.