Using uv on the SFSU virtual machine

Your account on the SFSU virtual machine cannot run sudo, so apt install and pip install into the system Python will fail. uv is optional here because it installs into your home directory and creates a personal environment, with no administrator rights. It is not the laptop uv workflow. Do it only after you can log in. The environment is $HOME/.venvs/main, and a new shell activates it for you.

1. Install uv

On the virtual machine:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
uv --version

The PATH line is written into ~/.bashrc in the next card, so later logins find uv without the export.

2. Create the environment

mkdir -p "$HOME/.venvs"
uv venv "$HOME/.venvs/main" --python 3.12

If Python 3.12 is not already on the system, ask uv for a private copy, then create the environment again:

uv python install 3.12
uv venv "$HOME/.venvs/main" --python 3.12

3. Activate it from Bash

Append this to ~/.bashrc on the virtual machine:

# Make uv available
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

# Activate my default uv-managed environment
if [ -f "$HOME/.venvs/main/bin/activate" ]; then
    source "$HOME/.venvs/main/bin/activate"
fi

Reload it:

source ~/.bashrc

echo "$VIRTUAL_ENV" should print a path ending in .venvs/main.

4. Install a package

With the environment active:

uv pip install mesa_reader

Check it:

python -c "import mesa_reader; print(mesa_reader.__file__)"

For a project on your own computer, with uv sync and uv run, use the uv page instead of this account-wide environment.