run-python-tools-with-uvx.md

Run Python Tools With uvx

The uvx binary which gets installed as part of uv is equivalent to using uv tool run. It installs the specified tool into an isolated, throwaway environment and then runs it from that environment. This is useful for running standalone Python tools that don't necessarily need to know anything about or use a specific codebase.

A dummy example of this is the classic cowsay program.

❯ uvx cowsay -t "Python tooling is so powerful\!"
  ______________________________
| Python tooling is so powerful! |
  ==============================
                              \
                               \
                                 ^__^
                                 (oo)\_______
                                 (__)\       )\/\
                                     ||----w |
                                     ||     ||

As for some more practical examples, here I can use rich-cli to render and view a markdown file like a README.md right in the terminal.

❯ uvx --from rich-cli rich README.md --markdown --pager

Or how about trying out the latest version of a tool like ruff that differs from the version currently installed for the target project.

❯ uvx ruff@latest check .

As an example of another standalone tool, here is yt-dlp to grab a video from YouTube.

❯ uvx yt-dlp "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3-43VBqpPc"
Installed 1 package in 9ms
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3-43VBqpPc
[youtube] U3-43VBqpPc: Downloading webpage
[youtube] U3-43VBqpPc: Downloading visionos player API JSON
[youtube] U3-43VBqpPc: Downloading m3u8 information
[info] U3-43VBqpPc: Downloading 1 format(s): 616+251
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 456
[download] Destination: FILLER vs VAN BOENING 🔥 EPIC QUARTER-FINAL ｜ Las Vegas Open 2026- Dramatic Match [U3-43VBqpPc].f616.mp4
[download]  33.2% of ~ 775.25MiB at    9.37MiB/s ETA 00:56 (frag 152/456)