TIL - uvx.sh

In the past few months, like a lot of folk in the Python world, I've been won over by uv. When it comes to managing my own projects my journey over the past few years as been pipenv, then rye, and then when rye was killed off I finally swapped to uv (later than I should have, I realised in hindsight). At each step I've found each tool cleaner, easier to work with and more feature-rich.

There's no doubt in my mind that uv has done the most work to make installing Python-based tools (or at least PyPI-based tools) as friction-free an experience as possible.

Now I've discovered uvh.sh. The thing with uv is the person installing your application first needs to get and install uv; this site removes that friction. Now if someone wants to install obs2nlm (for example) they should be able to just do:

curl -LsSf uvx.sh/obs2nlm/install.sh | sh

and away they go (assuming they have curl installed, which is generally going to be far more likely than having uv installed).

Of course, there are the usual caveats and concerns about the "just pipe this stuff via sh trust me bro" approach, but if you are comfortable with suggesting this kind of install method it looks worth adding this to an application's installation documentation.

I think I'm going to start mentioning it as an option.