Installing without using uv

You may be in a locked down environment that doesn’t have a newer tool like uv already available, or perhaps you are already familiar with pip and venv and just want to use those over a new tool. Either way, installing coconext is still possible, with some tweaked directions.

To replace uv we need to install some other Python tools: pip and venv. Both of these tools require Python, so follow Installing Python first.

Install pip

pip is the official Python package manager. pip may already come with your Python distribution; so try the below commands in order and stop after the first succeeds.

pip --version  # This may be Python 2, check version output
pip3 --version
# Use the appropriate python command for your system
python -m pip --version
python3 -m pip --version

Note

These instructions require pip version 25.1 or newer for PEP 735 dependency group support (pip install --group). If your pip is older, upgrade with pip install --upgrade pip.

Remember whichever of these particular incantation worked; that will be how you invoke pip for the remainder of the installation instructions.

If all of the above fail, pip is not installed. Your package manager likely provides pip as a separate package.

Afterwards, try the set of pip invocations mentioned above to find out which one works on your system.

Install venv

venv is a virtual environment creation tool built into the Python standard library. To see if it’s available run python -m venv -h.

Some systems, notable Debian-based distributions, ship the venv library as a separate package.

Creating a pyproject.toml

This must be done manually, but it’s a fairly simple text file. This can be blank for now, as the only thing we need to add is the coconext dependency which we will cover in Installing coconext below.

Create and activate a Python virtual environment

Use venv to create a virtual environment in your project’s root directory. The idiomatic name for the virtual environment directory is .venv/.

python -m venv .venv/

Then you can activate the virtual environment with the following command.

. .venv/bin/activate

You can also set up your project so that the virtual environment is automatically activated when you enter the project directory. See Automatic virtual environment activation with direnv for more details.

Installing coconext

System Prerequisites

Currently, there are no system library prerequisites.

Installing Locally

Installing In User-global Environment

To install coconext globally with pip, run the following command.

pip install --user coconext

Note

Modifying the system-global environment of your operating system’s provided Python is not recommended, and is disallowed on many operating systems. The operating system uses the system package manager instead of pip to manage this environment, and system utilities written in Python use this environment. Modifying this environment can break system utilities and make your system unusable. For those reasons, the --user flag is required so that packages are installed user-global.