January 15, 2025

Using uv as an installer

It’s hard to reliably package and distribute python command line tools to end users. Users frequently encounter challenges: dependency version conflicts, virtual environment management, needing to install python or a specific version of python, etc.

Aider employs uv in a couple of novel ways to streamline the installation process:

1. Install aider with curl https://aider.chat/install.sh | sh even if python isn’t already installed.

2. Users who have python 3.8+ installed can pip install aider-install && aider-install.

Both methods use uv to globally install the aider command line program, with all of its dependencies in an isolated environment. They ensure that aider will run with python 3.12, and install that version if it is not already available.

These uv install methods are especially helpful for aider, because it has a large set of very specific dependencies. Since not all of aider’s dependencies are available on all python versions, it requires python 3.9-3.12.

Most users don’t want to worry about these details – they just want a quick way to install and run aider.

One-liners

Users can install aider with a shell one-liner, without even having python previously installed:

curl -LsSf https://aider.chat/install.sh | sh

This installs uv, then uses it to install python 3.12, install the aider command line tool and update the user’s shell path. Under the hood, it is simply a copy of uv’s own install script https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh with one line added, to install aider as a tool:

ensure "${_install_dir}/uv" tool install --force --python python3.12 aider-chat@latest

aider-install

The aider-install python package allows quick global installation of aider for users who already have python 3.8+ installed. It simply provides the aider-install command line program, which users just need to run once.

pip install aider-install
aider-install

The pip install aider-install installs only two packages: aider-install and the uv python package. This ensures that uv is available in the user’s environment. Everything else is installed in a stand-alone environment created by uv.

When the user runs aider-install, it runs uv to install aider as a tool and update the user’s shell path if needed:

uv tool install --force --python python3.12 aider-chat
uv tool update-shell

Benefits

These uv install methods have been popular with users, providing a hassle free way to install aider and quickly get started. Installs are also extremely fast, much faster than pip or pipx installs even when uv is also installing python 3.12!

There are also a number of benefits from the perspective of the tool developer/publisher. Since providing these install methods, far fewer users report dependency problems and version conflicts as compared to users who pip install aider-chat. There is also less pressure to rapidly support the newest python versions, since aider always installs with python 3.12.