pipenv is slow. Use uv for lightning fast dependency management.

[anunayasri]

Using pipenv for dependency management for too slow on my laptop. The first install(and even subsequent installs) of dependencies takes several minutes 😢

To resolve this I have generated a hack to use pdm and uv for dependency management.

If you have the same problem, read along 🙂

We have a Pipfile which is not supported out of box by uv. We will use pdm to generate a pyproject.toml file with project dependencies. We will then use the newly created pyproject.toml to dependency installation using uv. The pyproject.toml file present in the repo does not have project dependencies, but have project metadata adn configurations for tools like ruff.

# backup pyproject.toml
mv pyproject.toml pyproject.toml.orig

Install pdm: https://pdm-project.org/latest/

cd $PROJECT_ROOT

# generate pyproject.toml from Pipfile
# this will start a setup flow which is self-explanatory.
# if the setup flow is confusing to you, following is a little help
#   python interpreter: choose system python. should be >= 3.9
#   build this project for distribution: yes
#   backend: pdm-backend
#   python requires: >=3.9
#   it will auto-detect the dependencies in Pipfile and will offer you to choose this option. use Pipfile to import dependencies.

pdm init

Install uv: https://docs.astral.sh/uv/getting-started/installation/

uv has a different way than pdm to specify dev dependencies. Change the following lines

[tool.pdm.dev-dependencies]
dev = [...]

to

[tool.uv]
dev-dependencies = []

# Gen uv.lock
uv lock

# create virtual env
# this will create `.venv` folder in the current directory
uv venv

# install deps using uv.lock. ensure uv.lock is not updated.
# this will download the deps and hence will take some time.
uv sync --frozen

Restore the original pyproject.toml file

mv pyproject.toml pyproject.toml.uv
mv pyproject.toml.orig pyproject.toml

TODO

1. The Pipfile is updated with new dependencies. How to take a pull and install the new dependencies?
2. How to add new dependencies that you have added to the project?