Still using pip and venv? You're outdated! Try uv!

If you’re used to pip install, manually creating virtual environments, and managing requirements.txt yourself, you might be surprised by uv.

This is a Python package management tool developed by the Astral team and written in Rust. It not only replaces the functionality of pip, venv, and pip-tools, but also provides faster dependency resolution and a more modern project management approach.

Start with uv init to create a project skeleton with one command

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We won’t start with “how to install uv,” but with “how to use uv to create a project.”

uv init

After running this command, uv will help you:

• Create a .venv virtual environment;
• Initialize the pyproject.toml configuration file;
• (Optional) Add dependencies;
• Generate a uv.lock lock file;
• Set .venv as the default environment for the current directory (no manual activation needed);

The entire process only requires one command to complete what used to take multiple steps, making it a better starting point for building Python projects.

Install dependencies using uv add (instead of pip install)

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The traditional way is:

pip install requests

But in the uv world, adding dependencies looks like this:

uv add requests

The benefits are:

• Automatically writes to pyproject.toml’s [project.dependencies];
• Automatically installs into .venv;
• Automatically updates the uv.lock lock file;
• No need to maintain requirements.txt anymore.

If you want to add development dependencies (such as testing or formatting tools), you can:

uv add --dev pytest ruff

Want to remove dependencies?

uv remove requests

Running project scripts or tools: uv venv + uvx

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uv’s virtual environment is installed by default in .venv, but you don’t need to source activate every time. Just execute:

uv venv

This ensures that .venv exists and is automatically configured as the default Python environment for the current shell. After that, you can run scripts or tools without worrying about path issues.

Even better, uv provides a uvx command, similar to pipx and Node.js’s npx, which allows you to directly run CLI tools installed in the project.

For example, let’s use ruff to check or format Python code:

uvx ruff check .
uvx ruff format .

Now with uvx, you don’t need to install a bunch of global tools, nor do you need to use pre-commit to unify command calls—use it directly within the project, it’s cross-platform and convenient.

Example Project Structure

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After uv init and some uv add commands, a clean Python project structure might look like this:

my-project/
├── .venv/               ← Virtual environment
├── pyproject.toml       ← Project configuration (dependencies, metadata, etc.)
├── uv.lock              ← Locked dependency versions
├── main.py              ← Project entry script

User Experience?

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I’ve recently adopted uv as the default tool for new projects:

• No more manually writing requirements.txt
• No more struggling with mixing poetry.lock and pyproject.toml
• Dependency installation is very fast, 3-5 times faster for large projects on the first installation.
• Combined with ruff as a Lint + Format tool, there’s no need to install black and flake8 separately.

In CI, I’m also gradually replacing pip install -r requirements.txt with it, using the lock file to build the environment for stronger consistency.

Summary

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If you:

• Are dissatisfied with the slow speed of pip install;
• Don’t want to write a bunch of requirements files;
• Want a more modern, faster, and more automated Python project structure;

Then you should try uv. It’s a faster and more modern package manager toolset.

Starting with your next project, why not start with uv init?

Project address: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/