uv
astral-sh/uvReviewed by AI
What it does
uv is a command-line tool that does the jobs usually split between pip, pipx, poetry, pyenv, virtualenv and twine: it installs packages, creates isolated environments, locks exact dependency versions, installs and switches Python versions, runs single-file scripts and publishes packages. It is for people who write Python. There are ready binaries for Windows, Mac and Linux (about 15 MB) and a one-line install command; you do not need Python or Rust installed first, and uv can download Python for you.
How easy it is to install
A · download and open · Windows
- Windows A
- macOS A
- Linux A
Every release ships a ready binary for Windows, Mac and Linux (for example uv-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zip, 15 MB), and the README gives a single install command per system; nothing else has to be installed first. After that you use it by typing commands in a terminal, so it is only useful to someone comfortable with a terminal.
Numbers on GitHub
- Stars
- 91,403on Oct 31, 2026
- Downloads
- 1,156,112,96834,086,943 this week
- Growth
- +229stars in 6 days
Stars over time
Facts
- Runs on
- Windows, macOS, Linux
- You need to install
- Nothing extra
- To build from source
- Python, Docker, Rust
- Disk space
- 15 MB–46 MB · from the installer
- Accounts or keys
- None
- Cost
- Free · Free and open source (MIT or Apache-2.0, your choice). Astral, the company behind it, sells other products.
- License
- Apache-2.0 (Permissive)
- Last update
- Oct 31, 2026
Risk signals (2)
- Infoinstall pipes remote script to shell
README.md recommends installing with `curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh` on Mac and Linux and `powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"` on Windows, which runs a script downloaded from astral.sh without you reading it first. The same releases are available as plain archives on GitHub.
AI review
- Infoself update and runtime downloads
README.md documents `uv self update` for replacing the program itself, and `uv python install 3.12 3.13 3.14` plus `uv venv --python 3.12.0`, which download Python builds and packages from the internet while you use it.
AI review
Evidence is shown in its original language.
What Radar could not check
- The 10-100x speed comparison with pip shown in the README, which was measured by the authors
- How much disk the package cache and the downloaded Python versions grow to over time (the installed program itself is about 15-46 MB)
- Whether a given project's dependencies resolve to exactly the same versions as with pip or poetry
- Where the Python builds that uv downloads come from and how they are verified