global pip (--system ...) doesn't work in GitHub Codespaces

[Malix-Labs]

Bug

global pip (--system ...) doesn't work in GitHub Codespaces

System

• VSCode:
  Version: 1.89.0
  Commit: b58957e67ee1e712cebf466b995adf4c5307b2bd
  Date: 2024-05-01T02:15:54.732Z
  Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 14541.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/125.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
• uv 0.1.39

Reproduce

1. Open a GitHub Codespace
   • .devcontainer/devconainer.json:

      {
      	"name": "Python 3 on Debian 12",
      	"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/python:1-3-bookworm",
      	"features": {
      		"ghcr.io/va-h/devcontainers-features/uv:1": {}
      	}
      }

2. Terminal input: uv pip install prettytable --system
   Note: prettytable is just an exemple

Logs

@Malix-off ➜ /workspaces/Fork (master) $ uv pip install prettytable --system
Resolved 2 packages in 2ms
error: Failed to install: prettytable-3.10.0-py3-none-any.http.whl (prettytable==3.10.0)
  Caused by: failed to create directory `/usr/local/lib/python3.12/site-packages/prettytable-3.10.0.dist-info`
  Caused by: Permission denied (os error 13)

Note: prettytable is just an exemple

[zanieb]

Hi! It looks you don't have the necessary permissions to write to the system packages?

[charliermarsh]

Probably works in pip because pip falls back to installing with --user if the site-packages directory isn't writeable.

[Malix-Labs]

Hi! It looks you don't have the necessary permissions to write to the system packages?

Indeed, probably like that in GitHub Codespaces, you're right.

--user

Is that an equivalent for sync?

@Malix-off ➜ /workspaces/Fork (master) $ uv pip sync requirements.txt --user
error: pip-sync's `--user` is unsupported.

[charliermarsh]

No, we don't support --user right now, since it can generally be replaced by a virtual environment. There are some open issues tracking it but we haven't committed to adding it.

[Malix-Labs]

So what would be the workaround to pip sync without virtual environment (devcontainer is a good example)

[charliermarsh]

I think you basically need to use a virtualenv in that case with uv right now. I believe you can use virtual environments in devcontainers? Like it is possible, right?

[blueraft]

Running the devcontainer as the root user works for me.

 {
 	"name": "Python 3 on Debian 12",
 	"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/python:1-3-bookworm",
 	"features": {
 		"ghcr.io/va-h/devcontainers-features/uv:1": {}
        },
       	"remoteUser": "root"
 }

[Malix-Labs]

I think you basically need to use a virtualenv in that case with uv right now. I believe you can use virtual environments in devcontainers? Like it is possible, right?

Yep, currently you need a venv to do that, and yep, it is definitely possible, but adds an unnecessary virtual environment bloat (since we're already in a containerized environment)

[Malix-Labs]

No, we don't support --user right now, since it can generally be replaced by a virtual environment. There are some open issues tracking it but we haven't committed to adding it.

I didn't find any issue about it containing "user" "-u" "--user", do you know if it has been deleted?

[charliermarsh]

#2077

[Malix-Labs]

GitHub Codespaces probably doesn't let you access to the devcontainer system (immutability)

In the case of devcontainers, you probably indeed would want to use the --user flag (#2077)