rye VS asdf

I tried out rye + uv on a recent greenfield project. They are awesome tools and I'm really excited about their potential.

For me, rye (+ uv underneath) has perhaps the perfect workflow for an open source Python project. So I'm definitely using rye for that from now in -- instead of, say, poetry -- or hatchling directly, following the PyPA boilerplate[1].

You have a way of doing local development against any Python interpreter version. You have a way of tweaking dependencies. It all works atop "standard" PyPA infrastructure like pyproject.toml. You have a single command to build[1] project artifacts, like wheels. And you have a single command to publish new artifact versions to PyPI[2].

I think if you're doing local development on a project that is not meant to be published to PyPI, like a private Django project, then whether to use rye becomes more of a debate. For example, for a Django project I'm working on, I decided to just use uv directly, along with a Makefile. This is because during development of a Django project, I preferred to just use a plain requirements.txt (really, requirements.in) file, avoid the sync/lock workflow that rye imposes, and avoid the need to use something like rye run. And rye's ability to package didn't solve a problem since the Django project wasn't being deployed via a PyPA packaging mechanism.

But this is probably also because the Python interpreter/venv management problem, for me, is already handled by pyenv. I think if you're not already a pyenv user, rye is even more appealing because it handles "all" of the Python issues -- interpreters, requirements/dependencies, and packaging/publishing. (As well as a number of other standard issues besides, like testing, linting, and formatting.) But, in my case, I could hand venv management to uv, and then make dependency management part of a larger Makefile for my Django project, including custom linting, testing, and deployment steps. I wrote a little bit about my high level thoughts on Python packaging and dependency management, though this post was written before rye and uv were out.[4]

I'll also say, I found a little bug in how rye (+ hatch) interacted with my local git setup, and reported it to the rye team, and they helped me get to the bottom of it rather quickly.[5]

[1]: https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/tutorials/packaging-p...

[2]: https://rye-up.com/guide/commands/build/

[3]: https://rye-up.com/guide/commands/publish/

[4]: https://amontalenti.com/2022/10/09/python-packaging-and-zig

[5]: https://github.com/astral-sh/rye/issues/793

I've been using Rye[0] lately, which has been pretty good. It's really just a wrapper around a bunch of underlying tools - it's nice to not have to worry about those and let Rye do it's thing.

All that being said, the creator of Rye is 100% cognizant of that XKCD comic, this [1] is a nice read.

I'm not super well versed in Python tooling at all. I've had to work a lot in Python in the past 6+ months, and I become super confused when I tried making a Python project in my spare time.

I settled on Rye because it just seemed to be the easiest to use.

[0]: https://rye-up.com/

I think Rye actually does handle this mostly correctly (as the sibling comment said). I got through some of it here: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rye/issues/671. I think actually it's very close to what I actually want (maybe not what Armin wants with multiversion).

Rye[1] is an all in one manager for python projects. Including the python versions and virtualenv, pip etc etc... It seperates tool deps from app deps. Its all configured through a pyproject.toml config file.

Its still new but works well. I'm transiting to it from an unholy mess of pyenv, pip installs and other manual hacks.

If you're starting a new python project that is more than just a straightforward script I'd use Rye from the get go.

[1]https://rye-up.com/

Your first comment irked me because it adds zero value to the discussion. You lazily threw out XKCD 927 which the Rye author explicitly mentioned themselves.

If you click into their link "Should Rye Exist" [1] you'll see that XKCD 927 is literally the first sentence and full width image.

[1] https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rye/discussions/6

Try Rye.

Since this is a discussion on dependency management in Python - does anyone use rye [0] regularly now? I'm interested in using it but want a little more social validation before I try - some issues with package managers only appear after you've invested considerable time.

[0]: https://rye-up.com/

The short term solution is "relieving the packaging pain" link in the article.

The long term solution is described in the "What a solution could look like?" section of https://www.bitecode.dev/p/why-is-the-python-installation-pr...

The community is buzzing with attempts to fix those issues this year, so I’m hopping those posts will become obsolete one day.

Flask’s author is attempting something interesting with rye: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/rye

Trio’s author is drafting a spec for the equivalent of wheels, but for the whole python interpreter: https://github.com/njsmith/posy/blob/main/pybi/README.md

Not advocating to use them right now, but the fact is bootstrapping Python is finally acknowledged as one major cause of packaging issues and a priority to solve.

I'm building a package manager for Python (Rye) in Rust and it is modeled after cargo and rustup. It like rustup manages itself. This means it has commands such as rye self update which downloads the latest version and swaps itself out. Likewise there is rye self uninstall which uninstalls rye itself.

The main issue most people have with asdf is that it’s annoyingly slow. Not unusably so, but just enough that it’s irritating.

I identified [0] the source for much of it (sub-shells and pipes) and began a PR [1], but became bogged down with BATS testing, and then found mise / rtx, so kind of lost interest. Sorry. You can always implement these if you’d like.

[0]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/issues/290#issuecomment-1383...

[1]: https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf/pull/1441

Or if you need to manage more than just node, asdf has been around for over a decade and works great. You can use a .tool-versions to change runtimes for each project you have, in addition to managing your global runtime versions

https://asdf-vm.com/

Why not just use a tool like asdf (https://asdf-vm.com/) or mise (https://mise.jdx.dev/)?

These tools have the advantage of not being multi-taskers and can manage version for all your tools. You wouldn’t need pyenv and npm and rvm and…

We’ve even started committing the .mise.toml files for projects to our repos. That way, since we work on multiple projects that may need multiple versions of the same tool, it’s handled and documented.

The purpose of a version manager is to help you navigate or install any tools for development easily. Version Manager can be one tool for each dependency (e.g. NVM, g) or One tool for all dependencies (e.g. asdf, mise).

(asdf)[https://asdf-vm.com/] fully supports Python and almost any other language. I've been using it for Ruby, Python, Elixir, and other languages for years and never looked back.

Secondly, our development environments must not drift, because then code may behave differently and a change could pass on our machine but fail in production. There are many tools for locking down environments, e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc., and they all share the common goal of being able to lock down dependencies for an environment accurately and deterministically. And that needs to be enforced in our local workflow so we don't have to rely on CI environments for correctness. All developers must have environments that are effectively identical to what runs in CI (which itself should be representative of the production environment).

There are many ways this can be done (e.g nix, pkgx, asdf, containers, etc.), and we won’t get into which specific tools to use, because we'll instead cover the essential essence of preventing environment drift:

I've really been enjoying asdf, which is a program that allows you to install specified versions of dev utilities as well as dynamically manage them via shims and .tool-versions files.