Simon Willison’s Weblog

TIL: Using uv to develop Python command-line applications. I've been increasingly using uv to try out new software (via uvx) and experiment with new ideas, but I hadn't quite figured out the right way to use it for developing my own projects.

It turns out I was missing a few things - in particular the fact that there's no need to use uv pip at all when working with a local development environment, you can get by entirely on uv run (and maybe uv sync --extra test to install test dependencies) with no direct invocations of uv pip at all.

I bounced a few questions off Charlie Marsh and filled in the missing gaps - this TIL shows my new uv-powered process for hacking on Python CLI apps built using Click and my simonw/click-app cookecutter template.

# 24th October 2024, 5:56 am / packaging, pip, python, til, cookiecutter, uv, astral, charlie-marsh

simonw/docs cookiecutter template. Over the last few years I’ve settled on the combination of Sphinx, the Furo theme and the myst-parser extension (enabling Markdown in place of reStructuredText) as my documentation toolkit of choice, maintained in GitHub and hosted using ReadTheDocs.

My LLM and shot-scraper projects are two examples of that stack in action.

Today I wanted to spin up a new documentation site so I finally took the time to construct a cookiecutter template for my preferred configuration. You can use it like this:

pipx install cookiecutter
cookiecutter gh:simonw/docs

Or with uv:

uv tool run cookiecutter gh:simonw/docs

Answer a few questions:

[1/3] project (): shot-scraper
[2/3] author (): Simon Willison
[3/3] docs_directory (docs):

And it creates a docs/ directory ready for you to start editing docs:

cd docs
pip install -r requirements.txt
make livehtml

# 23rd September 2024, 9:45 pm / documentation, projects, python, markdown, cookiecutter, sphinx-docs, read-the-docs, uv

Upgrading my cookiecutter templates to use python -m pytest. Every now and then I get caught out by weird test failures when I run pytest and it turns out I'm running the wrong installation of that tool, so my tests fail because that pytest is executing in a different virtual environment from the one needed by the tests.

The fix for this is easy: run python -m pytest instead, which guarantees that you will run pytest in the same environment as your currently active Python.

Yesterday I went through and updated every one of my cookiecutter templates (python-lib, click-app, datasette-plugin, sqlite-utils-plugin, llm-plugin) to use this pattern in their READMEs and generated repositories instead, to help spread that better recipe a little bit further.

# 17th August 2024, 5:12 am / projects, python, pytest, cookiecutter

Cookiecutter Data Science (via) Some really solid thinking in this documentation for the DrivenData cookiecutter template. They emphasize designing data science projects for repeatability, such that just the src/ and data/ folders can be used to recreate all of the other analysis from scratch. I like the suggestion to give each project a dedicated S3 bucket for keeping immutable copies of the original raw data that might be too large for GitHub.

# 18th November 2021, 3:21 pm / data-science, cookiecutter

pypi-rename. I wanted to rename a PyPI package (renaming datasette-insert-api to datasette-insert as it’s about to grow some non-API features). PyPI recommend uploading a final release under the old name which points to (and depends on) the new name. I’ve built a cookiecutter template to codify that pattern.

# 25th July 2020, 11:07 pm / projects, pypi, cookiecutter

click-app. While working on sqlite-generate today I built a cookiecutter template for building the skeleton for Click command-line utilities. It’s based on datasette-plugin so it automatically sets up GitHub Actions for running tests and deploying packages to PyPI.

# 23rd June 2020, 2:21 am / projects, python, cookiecutter