Recently, I’ve been looking into MCP-related content, and many sources mention using uv to manage Python package dependencies. After learning more about it, uv appears to be a very useful tool. Here’s a summary of its functionality.
What exactly is uv?
First of all, uv is a package written in Rust for Python. After installation, you can use the uv command.
pip install uv
What can uv do?
- It can replace pip
Simply add uv before your regular pip commands. But why use uv instead of pip? The answer is speed - according to statistics, it’s 77 times faster than pip.
- It can replace venv or virtualenv
You need one less package, and the commands are cleaner. uv is much faster than venv and virtualenv when creating virtual environments and installing packages.
- It can replace poetry
You might ask, what is poetry? Poetry is a tool for more convenient management of Python dependencies. So why not just use pip + requirements? The answer is that it’s cumbersome. Additionally, requirements files cannot lock the dependencies of dependencies. For example, if I lock package A to a specific version, but A depends on B, C, and D, this often leads to the “works on my machine but not on others” problem. Now, with uv, poetry can also be replaced.
- It can replace pipx
Another question: what is pipx? pipx is a tool for installing Python utilities without polluting your environment.
For example, if I need to install a command-line tool, I would run:
pip install httpie
But this might pollute my environment, and uninstalling could have side effects. Now, I can run:
pipx install httpie
This won’t pollute the environment.
However, this command has also been replaced. Now you can run:
uv tool install
To summarize uv in one sentence: Python dependency management’s “next-generation de facto standard.”