uv is a package manager for Python.
spaCy is a natural language processing library. spaCy distributes different bundles of its NLP tools as separate Python packages.
Normally, one would do:
python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm # fails if using uv
But this fails when using uv. From what I can tell, the above command calls pip in a subprocess. The uv package manager mirrors (most of) the pip API. There is one major difference — uv expects users to do uv pip instead of just pip.
Fortunately, spaCy has releases available as .whl. Installing these directly circumvents the issue.
uv pip install en_core_web_sm@https://github.com/explosion/spacy-models/releases/download/en_core_web_sm-3.0.0/en_core_web_sm-3.0.0-py3-none-any.whl # no problem
Credit to:
Alternative solutions could include aliasing pip to uv pip. I haven’t tried this.