How to use uv to speed up Hatch

Hatch can use uv as its installer backend instead of pip and virtualenv. This makes environment creation and dependency installation significantly faster without changing the rest of your Hatch workflow.

Enable uv in your project

Add installer = "uv" to your default environment configuration in pyproject.toml:

[tool.hatch.envs.default]
installer = "uv"

This applies to the default environment. To enable uv for a specific environment like test:

[tool.hatch.envs.test]
installer = "uv"

Enable uv globally with an environment variable

To use uv across all Hatch projects without editing each pyproject.toml, set the HATCH_ENV_TYPE_VIRTUAL_UV_PATH environment variable to the absolute path of your uv binary:

export HATCH_ENV_TYPE_VIRTUAL_UV_PATH="$(which uv)"

$env:HATCH_ENV_TYPE_VIRTUAL_UV_PATH = (Get-Command uv).Source

Add this to your shell profile to make it permanent.

Verify it’s working

Recreate your environment to confirm uv is active:

hatch env prune
hatch env create

Dependency installation should complete noticeably faster than before.

Learn more

• Hatch reference page
• uv reference page
• Hatch installer documentation