Installing uv globally without pip

This is how you can install uv directly (without pip) into a Docker container:

FROM bitnami/deepspeed:0.14.0

# Install uv
COPY --from=ghcr.io/astral-sh/uv:latest /uv /uvx /bin/

# Copy your folder's files into the container.
COPY . /app

# go into the container
WORKDIR /app

# activate a virtual environment
RUN uv venv

# install into the virtual environment all dependencies
RUN uv pip install -r requirements.txt

# entry point - fun the shell to inspect your container
CMD ["sh"]

build by

docker build -t fastapi-app .
docker run --platform linux/amd64 -it fastapi-app # I am on a arm64 macos

 16:28:00.95 INFO  ==> 
 16:28:00.96 INFO  ==> Welcome to the Bitnami deepspeed container
 16:28:00.98 INFO  ==> Subscribe to project updates by watching https://github.com/bitnami/containers
 16:28:00.99 INFO  ==> Submit issues and feature requests at https://github.com/bitnami/containers/issues
 16:28:01.00 INFO  ==> Upgrade to Tanzu Application Catalog for production environments to access custom-configured and pre-packaged software components. Gain enhanced features, including Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), CVE scan result reports, and VEX documents. To learn more, visit https://bitnami.com/enterprise
 16:28:01.01 INFO  ==> 
 16:28:01.04 INFO  ==> Configuring libnss_wrapper

$ which uv
/usr/bin/uv
$ ls -hals /usr/bin/uv
31M -rwxr-xr-x 1 0 deepspeed 31M Mar 26 00:57 /usr/bin/uv

So you are running uv as deepspeed.

Installing uv with pip

This Dockerfile in which you use pip to install uv first, works, too. Here - as others pointed out, too - you have to make uv visible by adding ~/.local/bin to your PATH variable.

Another issue is that the user deepspeed runs into permission problems when installing the pip packages. Like in the solution given without pip, too. The trick is to activate first a uv environment by uv venv. By that, now, all the requirements.txt packages will be installed locally. And thus, you don't have any permission issues.

FROM bitnami/deepspeed:0.14.0

# Copy the application into the container.
COPY . /app

WORKDIR /app

RUN pip install uv

ENV PATH=/.local/bin:$PATH

RUN uv venv  # activates uv virtual environment - avoids permission issues
RUN uv pip install -r requirements.txt # now, installation is flawless


# entry point (to inspect the container)
CMD ["sh"]

Without RUN uv venv, or when trying to install with RUN uv pip install --system -r requirements.txt, you run into permission errors:

2.499 error: failed to remove file `/opt/bitnami/python/lib/python3.10/site-packages/Jinja2-3.1.3.dist-info/INSTALLER`: Permission denied (os error 13)

build by

docker build -t fastapi-app .
docker run --platform linux/amd64 -it fastapi-app # I am on a arm64 macos

This shell however behaves very weirdly.

1. It doesn't recognize uv. Only after export PATH=/.local/bin:$PATH it can recognize uv.
2. It was not possible to reactivate the uv virtual environment into which fastapi was installed into. fastapi as well as dotenv etc are present in /app/.venv/bin/. However, $ cd /app and $ uv venv just overwrites /app/.venv and creates a new virtual environment. When starting directly $ python, then import fastapi didn't work.
3. Only $ uv run python run a Python console which runs import fastapi. So $ uv run python is the solution.

Does someone know how to activate the original virtual environment? /app/.venv/bin/activate didn't work source was not found when doing source /app/.venv/bin/activate.

Even the PYTHONPATH manipulating didn't work.

I recommend the first solution therefore.