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HTTP credentials

uv supports credentials over HTTP when querying package registries.

Authentication can come from the following sources, in order of precedence:

  • The URL, e.g., https://<user>:<password>@<hostname>/...
  • A .netrc configuration file
  • A keyring provider (requires opt-in)

.netrc authentication is enabled by default, and will respect the NETRC environment variable if defined, falling back to ~/.netrc if not.

To enable keyring-based authentication, pass the --keyring-provider subprocess command-line argument to uv, or set UV_KEYRING_PROVIDER=subprocess.

Authentication may be used for hosts specified in the following contexts:

  • [index]
  • index-url
  • extra-index-url
  • find-links
  • package @ https://...

Persistence of credentials

If authentication is found for a single index URL or net location (scheme, host, and port), it will be cached for the duration of the command and used for other queries to that index or net location. Authentication is not cached across invocations of uv.

When using uv add, uv will not persist index credentials to the pyproject.toml or uv.lock. These files are often included in source control and distributions, so it is generally unsafe to include credentials in them. However, uv will persist credentials for direct URLs, i.e., package @ https://username:password:example.com/foo.whl, as there is not currently a way to otherwise provide those credentials.

If credentials were attached to an index URL during uv add, uv may fail to fetch dependencies from indexes which require authentication on subsequent operations. See the index authentication documentation for details on persistent authentication for indexes.

Learn more

See the index authentication documentation for details on authenticating index URLs.

See the pip compatibility guide for details on differences from pip.