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Anant Mishra
Anant Mishra

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uv - faster pip written in Rust 🦀

#python #rust #programming #productivity

If you’ve been working with Python for a while, chances are you’ve used pip more times than you can count.

Python packaging has historically been fragmented in pip, virtualenv, poetry, conda ... uv aims to unify much of that experience into one consistent tool.

What Can uv Do?

uv isn’t just a faster pip. It’s more like a unified Python packaging tool.

Tool What uv Does
pip Install packages
pip-tools Compile lock files
pipx Install CLI tools
virtualenv Create and manage environments
poetry (partially) Project + dependency management

Insallation

Visit Astral-uv before running these commands just in-case they have changed them.

  • MacOS and Linux 
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
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  • Windows 
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
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Working with uv

Creating a FastAPI project

There are so many commands integrated with uv that I can’t cover in this article. So instead, let’s build a simple project with a virtual environment, specific python version, project metadata and dependencies all in few commands.

uv init my-app --python 3.12
cd my-app
uv add fastapi uvicorn
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What uv did ? 

uv init my-app --python 3.12
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uv init initializes a brand-new Python project and configures it to use a specific Python version (3.12 in this case).

Behind the scenes, it:

  • 📁 Creates the project directory (my-app) (with version-control .git) and generates a pyproject.toml (managing dependendicies)

  • Sets requires-python = ">=3.12" and depending resoution with locking support.

No manual setup. No boilerplate. No extra tooling.

File structure

uv add fastapi uvicorn
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On adding the dependencies, it automatically:

  • 📦 Creates a virtual environment (.venv/) if it doesn't already exist and installs the packages inside that environment
  • Updates pyproject.toml - resolves dependencies and generates a uv.lock file for reproducible installs

File structure

Running the app - uv run

Updating main.py with

from fastapi import FastAPI

app = FastAPI()

@app.get("/")
def read_root():
    return {"Hello": "World"}
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Run it with:

uv run uvicorn main:app --reload
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uv run ensures the command executes inside the managed environment — no activation needed.

Learning uv

Nothing better than reading their documentation - Astral - UV docs

That’s the beauty of uv - it removes the initial setup and keeps the workflow focused on building, not managing tools, another great tool built with rust 🦀

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