Virtual environments folder outside project

[tmct]

Hi,

I was hoping you could help solve my problem please.

At work I am often developing in a situation where I have a persistent storage directory (let's say at /persist/code) as well as ephemeral user directories (say at /home/me). I want to develop in /persist/code (including uv projects!), but I cannot hardlink in that folder, which drastically slows down uv pip installs etc.

For other workflows (e.g. using hatch) I can work around this by defaulting to ephemeral virtual environments in a path in /home/me, which my projects reference. But uv appears to strongly push for virtualenv living alongside code (in .venv). I can understand why that choice is usually very nice, especially when you don't have to activate environments, but is there a way to tell uv "I would like you to create all my virtual environments in this folder somewhere else, by default" please? (It looks like I could set UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT, but unless I wanted environments to overwrite each other, I would need to vary that setting per project/workspace.)

I am wondering what the best way to achieve this might be - what might you suggest?

Thanks,
Tom

[zanieb]

Duplicate of #1495

[zanieb]

I'd recommend setting UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT with direnv or something for now. We haven't designed a solution to this yet.

[tmct]

Thank you! That will do nicely