uv overtakes Poetry
uv download statistics overtake Poetry for Wagtail users
The data ^ seems pretty clear – uv is now the second most popular package installer for Wagtail users, after pip, taking over from Poetry.
Poetry is still pretty popular – and so is pip. But the growth in uv usage likely isn’t just from new users of Wagtail like the data might convey at a glance (see the query - PyPI download statistics in BigQuery).
Note the chart above has July-August 2024 numbers manually adjusted – it looks like someone did an oopsie around that time, perhaps a uv early adopter letting CI go wild? (❤️ happens to the best of us) Or a version resolution gotcha for people testing Django pre-releases? Hmm.
What it means for Wagtail
We need to make sure it works well with uv, in addition to other tools! Possibly update some of our docs. uv as a first-class citizen for bakerydemo site? Updating the news template? We want to be careful that usage instructions make sense for all package managers, but also adapt to Python developers’ shifting expectations.
This is our current recommended install steps for first-time users:
pip install wagtail wagtail start mysite cd mysite pip install -r requirements.txt python manage.py migrate python manage.py createsuperuser python manage.py runserver
With uv:
uvx wagtail@latest start mysite cd mysite uv pip install -r requirements.txt uv python manage.py migrate uv python manage.py createsuperuser uv python manage.py runserver
There’s ways we could go further here, perhaps have more of a one-liner "uvx wagtail@latest start mysite --autorun" scaffolding experience (rare in the Django world). Tooling evolutions like those in uv this are a great opportunity for us to revisit those developer experience fundamentals.
