failed to write to site-packages when using uv, works fine with vanilla pip

[jamiekt]

I'm trying to use uv in a docker image build. As uv is meant to be a "drop-in replacement" I've pretty much done that, dropped it in, and its failing with a permissions error.

here is my Dockerfile, I'm aware of the new --system flag (#2046) so I'm using that.

ARG AIRFLOW_VERSION="2.4.1"
FROM apache/airflow:slim-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}-python3.10 as base
FROM base as development
USER root
RUN apt update && apt install -y unzip libsasl2-dev build-essential && \
    curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip" && \
    unzip awscliv2.zip && \
    ./aws/install && \
    rm -rf awscliv2.zip ./aws/
USER airflow
COPY requirements-dev.txt requirements-dev.txt
RUN pip install uv && uv pip install --no-cache-dir --system -r requirements-dev.txt

requirements_dev.txt is simply this:

aiofiles==23.2.1

(my actual requirements file is far more complicated than this, but this is sufficient to repro the error)

The build (docker build --target development .) fails with

24.74 Caused by: failed to create directory /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/aiofiles-23.2.1.dist-info
24.74 Caused by: Permission denied (os error 13)

If I do not use uv:

ARG AIRFLOW_VERSION="2.4.1"
FROM apache/airflow:slim-${AIRFLOW_VERSION}-python3.10 as base
FROM base as development
USER root
RUN apt update && apt install -y unzip libsasl2-dev build-essential && \
    curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip" && \
    unzip awscliv2.zip && \
    ./aws/install && \
    rm -rf awscliv2.zip ./aws/
USER airflow
COPY requirements-dev.txt requirements-dev.txt
RUN pip install --no-cache-dir --user -r requirements-dev.txt

then it works fine.

As uv is badged as a "drop-in replacement" is it fair to expect this to work? Any guidance on the best way to fix this would be appreciated!

[jamiekt]

I got around this by adding

RUN chmod -R 775 /usr/local

after the apt install step (has to be /usr/local rather than /usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages because I have some packages that attempt to create files in /usr/local/bin), but I'd rather not have to grant extra permissions. I think this worked with pip because I used the --user flag so I'm wondering if there's an equivalent switch for uv (it seems --system is not that switch).

[zanieb]

Thanks for debugging it! pip will fallback from system installs to user installs if it doesn't have permissions but we don't support user installs yet. You can track that at #2077