uv and python environments

uv is a Python package and project manager. See uv’s docs for more information.

We are currently considering whether we could use it to split up our python processes and use it for python version management on instrument machines.

uv files

• c:\Instrument\apps\uv\ is the main installation folder for uv itself.

• c:\Instrument\apps\uv\snakes is the location of individually-versioned python interpreter executables. These are “bare” interpreters, that do not contain any dependencies such as genie_python.

• c:\Instrument\var\tmp\uvcache is the location of uv’s pip download cache. This can safely be deleted and will be recreated as-needed.

Installing uv

We have a script which is used in various places to install uv. This will install uv into c:\Instrument\apps\uv\ and can be run on instruments, build machines and developer machines.

To install uv run \\isis\shares\ISIS_Experiment_Controls_Public\ibex_utils\installation_and_upgrade\install_or_update_uv.bat

For developer machines currently this can be used for things that aren’t in \Instrument\Apps\EPICS\ such as projects you have in Instrument\dev\ or for manually running the items below.

Usage of uv in IBEX

IBEX install scripts

uv is used for a few things here.

Firstly, installing the python executable itself onto an instrument machine.

Secondly, setting up a temporary virtual environment, which gets deleted at the end of the script, for using the deploy scripts themselves.

Build jobs e.g. ConfigChecker

uv is used for creating a virtual environment for jenkins-run python checks.

It can be used on Github actions CI, but isn’t currently.

Instrument processes

We are starting to use uv to help us create and manage virtual environments on instrument PCs at deploy time. More information on this can be found in the Dependency update notes.