Context

Project management and packaging in Python has always been messy and opaque. It is one of the main frustration factors for new developers. There is no one established solution for dealing with:

• Virtual environment setup and management
• Dependency resolving and locking
• Installing and managing different Python versions
• Creating and distributing (PyPi) packages

Instead, numerous tools exist that each try to improve the situation. Mostly, they succeed in tackling a few of those challenges but most tools have fallen short of offering a decent solution to all of them.

This changes with Rye. A new, one-stop-shop solution to all problems around Python development. Its documentation describes it like this:

Rye is a comprehensive project and package management solution for Python. Born from its creator’s desire to establish a one-stop-shop for all Python users, Rye provides a unified experience to install and manages Python installations, pyproject.toml based projects, dependencies and virtualenvs seamlessly. […]

While still new, in my experience Rye already works very well and is “production ready”. For example, I’ve successfully used it in my latest open source project Bike Radar. Admittedly, some competitor tools are currently more popular. But my money for the one tool to prevail (if there ever will be one) is on Rye!

Why Rye beats the competition

I’m not an expert in Python tooling and I have not tried everything out there (nor will I ever do that, since there is too much). But I have my fair share of personal and professional experience with Python development. Hence, I have encountered the most common use cases and their challenges in various projects. That’s why I’m convinced that Rye is currently the best choice. This is mainly due to it truly being a “one-stop-shop”. Some particular reasons for my believe:

• Written in Rust and thus fast (En vogue for Python tooling lately. Think ruff, polars, pydantic)
• Great cross platform support
• Adheres to pyproject.toml standard
• No install dependencies (not even Python itself)
• Simplicity of usage. Easy to install and it just works
• Deals with virtualenvs automatically and implicitly. No more . venv/bin/activate and deactivate
• Takes care of Python installation. Works alongside existing Python installations

The last point being the killer feature in my eyes as this is something that most other popular alternatives lack. In result, other solutions always require a combination of several tools (mostly the need to still use pyenv). In contrast, Rye is truly the one tool do to it all (obviously this depends on your needs, so YMMV).

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a future proof ¹ workflow for managing your Python projects and deal with virtual environments, dependencies, Python versions and packaging, look no further than Rye.