Feature Request: Support for global venv

[gaby]

The main purpose of this ticket is to request support for global venvs. Similar concept to what pipx install --global does. Where the package is installed in a global venv instead of a user one. This allows for systems that pre-install applications for multiple-users to be able to manage/isolate these easily.

Current workaround is to use uv pip install --system ruff. But this doesn't isolate the dependencies the same way a venv does and it's very easy to run into dependency issues between installed packages. We have a tried using pipx, but the inject ecosystem and upgrading packages using a spec is inconsistent across the board. Currently pipx supports using --global for all their commands.

Information about how the --global in pipx works is here: https://pipx.pypa.io/stable/installation/#-global-argument

When using --global in pipx, the following happens:

• man pages are installed here: /usr/local/share/man
• binaries/entrypoints are installed here: /usr/local/bin
• global envs are installed here: /opt/pipx/venv

When injecting packages/dependencies into a package it does support passing --global, and these application binaries/man-pages also become global within that global venv.

[zanieb]

Similar to the request in https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/issues/8431

You can use UV_TOOL_BIN_DIR and UV_TOOL_DIR for this right now. It seem sort of nice to have a flag for this, but I'm not sure if it's a high priority and generally these paths are different based on the distribution you're using so I'm hesitant to add defaults.

[gaby]

Oh I didn't know that was an option, That's neat trick although a bit verbose. The paths should be consistent between linux and macos. The feature is not supported for Windows (It's supported on Windows WSL through which uses sames paths as linux I believe.).

At least /usr/local/share/man and /usr/local/bin are consistent across distributions. The one where the global env's go is basically PIPX_HOME.

I was able to replicate using the instructions from #8431

root@pi:/home/pi # docker run -it --rm --entrypoint=/bin/bash python:3.10-slim
root@68e761f4bba3:/# pip install uv
Collecting uv
  Downloading uv-0.4.25-py3-none-manylinux_2_28_aarch64.whl (12.7 MB)
     ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 12.7/12.7 MB 16.4 MB/s eta 0:00:00
Installing collected packages: uv
Successfully installed uv-0.4.25
root@68e761f4bba3:/# mkdir -p /opt/uv/venv
root@68e761f4bba3:/# export UV_TOOL_BIN_DIR=/usr/local/bin
root@68e761f4bba3:/# export UV_TOOL_DIR=/opt/uv/venv
root@68e761f4bba3:/# uv tool install ruff
Resolved 1 package in 401ms
Prepared 1 package in 629ms
Installed 1 package in 3ms
 + ruff==0.7.0
Installed 1 executable: ruff
root@68e761f4bba3:/# pip list
Package    Version
---------- -------
pip        23.0.1
setuptools 65.5.1
uv         0.4.25
wheel      0.44.0

root@68e761f4bba3:/# ruff version
ruff 0.7.0

Having a native way of doing this without setting 2 ENV's would be ideal.