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Publishing a package

uv supports building Python packages into source and binary distributions via uv build and uploading them to a registry with uv publish.

Preparing your project for packaging

Before attempting to publish your project, you'll want to make sure it's ready to be packaged for distribution.

If your project does not include a [build-system] definition in the pyproject.toml, uv will not build it by default. This means that your project may not be ready for distribution. Read more about the effect of declaring a build system in the project concept documentation.

Note

If you have internal packages that you do not want to be published, you can mark them as private:

[project]
classifiers = ["Private :: Do Not Upload"]

This setting makes PyPI reject your uploaded package from publishing. It does not affect security or privacy settings on alternative registries.

We also recommend only generating per-project tokens: Without a PyPI token matching the project, it can't be accidentally published.

Building your package

Build your package with uv build:

$ uv build

By default, uv build will build the project in the current directory, and place the built artifacts in a dist/ subdirectory.

Alternatively, uv build <SRC> will build the package in the specified directory, while uv build --package <PACKAGE> will build the specified package within the current workspace.

Info

By default, uv build respects tool.uv.sources when resolving build dependencies from the build-system.requires section of the pyproject.toml. When publishing a package, we recommend running uv build --no-sources to ensure that the package builds correctly when tool.uv.sources is disabled, as is the case when using other build tools, like pypa/build.

Publishing your package

Publish your package with uv publish:

$ uv publish

Set a PyPI token with --token or UV_PUBLISH_TOKEN, or set a username with --username or UV_PUBLISH_USERNAME and password with --password or UV_PUBLISH_PASSWORD. For publishing to PyPI from GitHub Actions, you don't need to set any credentials. Instead, add a trusted publisher to the PyPI project.

Note

PyPI does not support publishing with username and password anymore, instead you need to generate a token. Using a token is equivalent to setting --username __token__ and using the token as password.

If you're using a custom index through [[tool.uv.index]], add publish-url and use uv publish --index <name>. For example:

[[tool.uv.index]]
name = "testpypi"
url = "https://test.pypi.org/simple/"
publish-url = "https://test.pypi.org/legacy/"

Note

When using uv publish --index <name>, the pyproject.toml must be present, i.e. you need to have a checkout step in a publish CI job.

Even though uv publish retries failed uploads, it can happen that publishing fails in the middle, with some files uploaded and some files still missing. With PyPI, you can retry the exact same command, existing identical files will be ignored. With other registries, use --check-url <index url> with the index URL (not the publish URL) the packages belong to. When using --index, the index URL is used as check URL. uv will skip uploading files that are identical to files in the registry, and it will also handle raced parallel uploads. Note that existing files need to match exactly with those previously uploaded to the registry, this avoids accidentally publishing source distribution and wheels with different contents for the same version.

Installing your package

Test that the package can be installed and imported with uv run:

$ uv run --with <PACKAGE> --no-project -- python -c "import <PACKAGE>"

The --no-project flag is used to avoid installing the package from your local project directory.

Tip

If you have recently installed the package, you may need to include the --refresh-package <PACKAGE> option to avoid using a cached version of the package.

Next steps

To learn more about publishing packages, check out the PyPA guides on building and publishing.

Or, read on for guides on integrating uv with other software.