CLI reported by uv run on Windows is not found on invocation

[kdeldycke]

Tl;Dr: On Windows nuitka is reported as an available CLI in a uv venv:

$ uv run
Provide a command or script to invoke with `uv run <command>` or `uv run <script>.py`.

The following commands are available in the environment:

- nuitka
- nuitka-run
- pydoc
- python
- pythonw

See `uv run --help` for more information.

But its invocation fails:

$ uv --no-progress run --frozen -- nuitka --version
error: Failed to spawn: `nuitka`
  Caused by: program not found

Context

This happened in a GitHub action runner on windows-2022. But the exact same sequence and invocation works perfectly on macos-15, macos-13 or ubuntu-24.04.

Fix

To fix the issue, I have to use an indirect call to the Python interpreter on windows-2022:

$ uv --no-progress run --frozen -- python -m nuitka --version

Reproduction

To reproduce the issue, on Windows:

$ python -m pip install uv
$ uv venv
$ uv pip install nuitka
$ uv run -- nuitka --version

This issue has been reported and being discussed in Nuitka project at: Nuitka/Nuitka#3173

[kayhayen]

Just to provide you with what you are lacking there. Nuitka is providing its own scripts for Windows, these are cmd files, passed as scripts to setup() and not use entry points. The point being, that Nuitka wants a clean Python interpreter, so those scripts effectively only do python -m nuitka for the user.

It seems, as an incompatibility to normal pip/setuptools, you don't copy them. They need no treatment at all, just plain copy.

[bluss]

The output of 'The following commands are available in the environment' is based on listing the scripts path in the virtual environment, so something is definitely installed there as nuitka expects (listing explicitly and verbose output might be good for the bug report), but it might be a matter of the extension and that uv run doesn't dispatch that executable or script correctly.

[charliermarsh]

@zanieb -- Didn't we have some change that looks at the .exe here?

[zanieb]

Are you thinking of #6683? I don't think that would help here.

How are we suppose to execute .cmd files?

For reference, the script looks like this: https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka/blob/ff030b7ad508a1773c2d2563b55fee4b5e3eac9a/misc/nuitka.cmd

[samypr100]

I believe the recommendation is to use the formalized executable entrypoints.
Legacy setup.py scripts are not recommended as stated below by PyPA.

Although setup() supports a scripts keyword for pointing to pre-made scripts to install, the recommended approach to achieve cross-platform compatibility is to use Creating executable scripts entry points (see below).

[kayhayen]

Yes, I am sure that's the recommendation, however, with Nuitka supporting a wide range of Python versions, some of which predate these things being any good, I really don't want to deal with making the move like that. Do you consider to become compatible by placing the said scripts unchanged to where they belong, even though packagers should (generally) not do it?

And if that's not the case, is there a way for me to detect installation by uv pip so I can inform the users, that they should use standard pip instead, and alternatively how to invoke it, or maybe install a nuitka console script on Windows, that does only that?

[kdeldycke]

I just updated my test case with uv == 0.5.2.

uv reports the following commands on Windows:

> uv run
Provide a command or script to invoke with `uv run <command>` or `uv run <script>.py`.

The following commands are available in the environment:

- nuitka-run.cmd
- nuitka.cmd
- pydoc.bat
- python
- pythonw

See `uv run --help` for more information.

So off course calling nuitka as-is works on all platforms but Windows:

> uv --no-progress run --frozen -- nuitka --version
error: Failed to spawn: `nuitka`
  Caused by: program not found

Instead, calling nuitka.cmd on Windows works:

> uv --no-progress run --frozen -- nuitka.cmd --version
2.4.11
Commercial: None
Python: 3.12.7 (tags/v3.12.7:0b05ead, Oct  1 2024, 03:06:41) [MSC v.1941 64 bit (AMD64)]
Flavor: CPython Official
Executable: D:\a\nuitka-issue-3173\nuitka-issue-3173\.venv\Scripts\python.exe
OS: Windows
Arch: x86_64
WindowsRelease: 10
Version C compiler: C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Enterprise\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.41.34120\bin\Hostx64\x64\cl.exe (cl 14.3).

[zanieb]

Sweet, thank you for testing it.

That seems reasonable to me. We could special case .cmd and add it automatically, but that seems different than the standard Windows behavior.

[jenshnielsen]

That seems reasonable to me. We could special case .cmd and add it automatically, but that seems different than the standard Windows behavior.

I would not say so. In both powershell and cmd on windows you can execute a .cmd and a .ps1 file without the extension.

E.g. the following would work assuming nuitka is installed in the venv .venv

.venv\Scripts\activate
nuitka

Infact the same would also work in nu-shell on windows

It is however different from the behaviour of Rust's std lib Spawn

[zanieb]

Oh, I see. Hm. Thanks for that additional context.

We can track in #9151