uv is a turbo-fast Python package installer and resolver, written in Rust as a high-speed drop-in substitute for pip, pip-tools, and virtualenv.
It’s 10–100x faster than pip and pip-tools: with a warm cache, uv installs are near-instant.
A few more highlights
- Save Disk Space: uses a global cache to prevent duplicated dependencies
- Works Everywhere: supports macOS, Linux, and Windows.
- Easy to Install: You don’t need Python or Rust installed. You can use using curl, pip, or brew.
- Advanced Features: supports dependency version overrides and alternative resolution strategies.
- Better Error messages: Best-in-class error messages with a conflict-tracking resolver
- Advanced pip: editable installs, git dependicies, local dependencies, source distributions
- Rust: Rust is is known for its speed and safety
- “resolver”: a smart way to figure out which versions of packages can work together.
- global module cache: it remembers files it has already seen, so it doesn’t redownload or rebuild dependencies
- Copy-on-Write and hardlinks: this helps minimize disk space usage.
The bigger vision of uv is to transform Python package management with its speed and reliability.
If you’ve been in the Python ecosystem long enough, you know how painful it is to setup a Python environment or to create a package.
uv has plans to establish a “Cargo for Python,” a unified Python package and project manager that is extremely fast, reliable, and easy to use.
Think: a single binary that bootstraps your Python installation and gives you everything you need to be productive with Python, bundling not only
pip,pip-tools, andvirtualenv, but alsopipx,tox,poetry,pyenv,ruff, and more.Python tooling can be a low-confidence experience: it’s a significant amount of work to stand up a new or existing project, and commands fail in confusing ways. In contrast, when working in the Rust ecosystem, you trust the tools to succeed. The Astral toolchain is about bringing Python from a low-confidence to a high-confidence experience.
I’m excited to watch uv significantly improve the Python development experience!
Let’s look at some numbers from their benchmarks
cold installation (8–10x faster)
This is equivalent to running uv pip sync on a new machine
uv is 8–10x faster than pip and pip-tools without caching.
warm installation (80–115x faster)
It is 80–115x faster when running with a warm cache (e.g., recreating a virtual environment or updating a dependency)
creating a venv
It’s about 80x faster than python -m venv and 7x faster than virtualenv
More in this benchmarks
I tested out uv on the transformers package by hugging face.
The speed difference is crystal clear.
Below are a couple commands you should keep in handy to start using uv.
From installation to syncing dependencies.
Find the code on Deepnote.
Installation
Create venv
Activate venv
Install packages
Here’s what it looks like installing torch.
Generate locked dependencies
Sync dependencies
That’s all for this article!
If you want more information about uv, check out these links:
