Shims like in pyenv or rye

[martenlienen]

Does uv plan to add shims as they exist in rye or pyenv? With this, I mean a bunch of executables that dispatch to the correct executable when called depending on a local .python-version file or an environment variable. For example, in pyenv I can run cd ~/src/some-project; pyenv local project-venv and then, whenever I change into ~/src/some-project or a subdirectory, running python or another executable from some package will automatically dispatch to the environment project-venv without me having to explicitly activate it.

[charliermarsh]

Thanks! We plan to add this kind of behavior for Python, but likely not for other executables. I believe that's tracked here: #6265.

[charliermarsh]

(Gonna merge into that other issue.)

[martenlienen]

That is great! Is there a reason why you plan to support it only for the python executable?

[zanieb]

@martenlienen like.. what other executables? We install tools separately and don't need shims to manage them.

[martenlienen]

An example would be torchrun from pytorch, which I usually use as a library, but it also comes with this torchrun executable for multi-node training. Would the uv solution be to install pytorch in the project environment and separately as a tool?

[n-gao]

@zanieb Another example would be our experiment management library seml which must be executed from the same environment as the project environment. At the moment, I always have to manually activate my uv virtual environment. The actual project environment is needed to resolve configurations and discover loaded source files.

[zanieb]

Yeah until we have project-level tools (as described in #3560), I think a development dependency and uv run is the solution for tools that require the project to be installed.