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.

Details of uv setup

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

In the future we may consider using uv to create and build virtual environments for each respective python process that runs on the NDX. This requires some decisions and subsequent work:

• uv.lock files - should we keep them in source, or at least on the build server, then build virtual environments on the NDXes with those specific versions?

• python wheels need to be available for everything we use - the NDXes do not have compilers ie. Visual Studio installed.