Allow configuration of environment discovery (i.e., only check cwd)

[ollie-bell]

Question

The docs explain that uv pip commands will search for a virtual environment which ultimately resorts to looking up in parent directories.

Can this behaviour be configured (e.g. via an environment variable or in pyproject.toml tool.uv.pip) such that uv pip commands will strictly only search in the current directory, and not try to search parent directories?

Platform

Darwin 24.3.0 arm64

Version

uv 0.6.13 (a0f5c72 2025-04-07)

[zanieb]

No, that's not configurable at this time. What's your use-case?

[ollie-bell]

I just found that it's not behaviour I necessarily want. e.g. I was in a project directory (say ~/projects/my-project) without a environment folder and running uv pip install installed into some random virtualenv I happened to have in my home directory (~/.venv). IMO I'd prefer for uv pip to just tell me to make a environment in my current directory than install in another random one it could find in a parent directory.

[zanieb]

I think you can do UV_PYTHON="./.venv" (or the matching setting in the toml)

[ollie-bell]

Yeh that seems to work! It would be slightly more obvious to have an explicit setting for uv pip not searching parent directories, but that's just my 2c.. thanks!

[ollie-bell]

Ah actually it doesn't work because now uv venv fails with

  × No interpreter found for path `./.venv` in managed installations or search path

after adding

[tool.uv.pip]
python = "./.venv"

to pyproject.toml

[zanieb]

It would be slightly more obvious to have an explicit setting for uv pip not searching parent directories, but that's just my 2c.. thanks!

Perhaps, but we have a lot of options and we need to see significant need from multiple users before we can justify adding more.

Ah actually it doesn't work because now uv venv fails with

Oh, funny... not sure what to do about that yet. uv venv --no-config would work as a hack, I guess.

[ollie-bell]

Understood! I'll stick with the default behaviour for now and will keep a look out for any new config updates in the future :) Thanks.

Feel free to turn this into a feature request if that's how you track such requests (or I'm happy to make a feature request issue?)