written on Sunday, February 4, 2024
In April of last year I released Rye to the public. Rye, both then and now, represents my very personal vision of what an improved Python packaging and project management solution can look like. Essentially, it's a comprehensive user experience, designed so that the only tool a Python programmer would need to interface with is Rye itself and it gets you from zero to one in a minute. It is capable of bootstrapping Python by automatically downloading different Python versions, it creates virtualenvs, it manages dependencies, and lints and formats. Initially developed for my own use, I decided to release it to the public, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.
When I introduced it, I initiated a discussion thread titled “Should Rye Exist” referencing the well known XKCD #929 which humorously comments on the proliferation of competing standards. I did not feel well throwing yet another Python packaging tool into the ring.
Yet it exists now and has user. This standard issue however I think is helped a bit by the fact that Rye doesn't actually do any of these things itself. It wraps established tools:
- Downloading Python: it provides an automated way to get access to the amazing Indygreg Python Builds as well as the PyPy binary distributions.
- Linting and Formatting: it bundles ruff and makes it available with rye lint and rye fmt.
- Managing Virtualenvs: it uses the well established virtualenv library under the hood.
- Building Wheels: it delegates that work largely to build.
- Publishing: its publish command uses twine to accomplish this task.
- Locking and Dependency Installation: is today implemented by using unearth and pip-tools.
As you can see, Rye is not revolutionary and it's not intended to be. Rye itself doesn't do all that much as it delegates all the core functionality to other tools in the ecosystem. Rye packages these tools together in a user-friendly manner, significantly reducing the cognitive load for developers. This convenience eliminates the need to learn about various tools, read extensive documentation, and integrate these components independently. Rye lets you get from no Python on a computer to a fully functioning Python project in under a minute with linting, formatting and everything in place. It is sufficiently opinionated that many important decisions are made for you. For instance it starts you out with using pyproject.toml and picks a wheel build system for you. It also picks the linter and formatter, and the preferred Python distribution and decides on a build tool.
Defaults Matter
Rye is designed to select the best tools for the job — it picks winners. Why does it do that? This approach is inspired by my admiration for the developer experience in the Rust ecosystem, particularly the seamless integration of rustup and cargo. Their functionality made me long for a similar experience within the Python community. Crucially the way this works in the Rust world does not mean that cargo does everything. When you run cargo build it invokes rustc, when you run cargo doc it runs rustdoc. When you invoke cargo clippy it runs clippy for you and so worth. Cargo is a manager that delegates the important work to bespoke tools that are improved by sometimes entirely different teams. This also means that tools can be swapped out if they are found to be not the right choice any more. The experience in the Rust world also showed me that excellent Windows support is just a must have. That's why Rye is not just a great experience on macOS and Linux, it's also excellent on Windows.
I am convinced that the Python community is deserving of an excellent developer experience, and Rye, as it stands today, offers a promising beginning. My belief is supported by evidence gathered from conducting in-person user interviews and demos, where Rye was well received. In fact, every individual who I was able to give a guided tour of Rye was impressed by how swiftly one could start working with Python. Because it was demonstrably designed to avoid interference with any pre-existing Python configurations, Rye allows for a smooth and gradual integration and the emotional barrier of picking it up even for people who use other tools was shown to be low.
That said, Rye is a one person project and it does not address the fundamental challenges of some of the issues we have in the Python ecosystem. It does not solve multi version dependencies, it does not offer better performance for the installation of dependencies. It does not help with distributing executables for end user applications or anything like this. However I am getting multiple signals that the time is right for a tool like Rye to not just exist, but also to rally a larger number of the Python community embrace some of these standardization ideas.
What's Next?
Chris Warrick recently wrote a blog post where he looked back at the last year of Python packaging that made the rounds on Twitter. It laments a bit that we did not make much of a progress in packaging and it also talks a bit about Rye and correctly points out that Rye does not have enough contributors (basically just me). That's not a healthy setup.
I still don't really know if Rye should exist. It has not yet become established and there are plenty of rough edges. I personally really enjoy using it but at the same time every time I use it, I get reminded that it would stop existing if I did not invest time into it which in some sense is what keeps me going on it.
However I would love to see the community converge to a Rye like solution, no matter where it comes from.
Learn More
Did I spark your interest? I would really appreciate it if you give it a try and give feedback:
a 16 minute introduction to Rye
This entry was tagged announcement and python
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