To distribute your project to others (e.g., to upload it to an index like PyPI), you'll need to build it into a distributable format.
Python projects are typically distributed as both source distributions (sdists) and binary distributions (wheels). The former is typically a .tar.gz or .zip file containing the project's source code along with some additional metadata, while the latter is a .whl file containing pre-built artifacts that can be installed directly.
Important
When using uv build, uv acts as a build frontend and only determines the Python version to use and invokes the build backend. The details of the builds, such as the included files and the distribution filenames, are determined by the build backend, as defined in [build-system]. Information about build configuration can be found in the respective tool's documentation.
uv build
uv build can be used to build both source distributions and binary distributions for your project. By default, uv build will build the project in the current directory, and place the built artifacts in a dist/ subdirectory:
$ uv build
$ ls dist/
example-0.1.0-py3-none-any.whl
example-0.1.0.tar.gz
You can build the project in a different directory by providing a path to uv build, e.g., uv build path/to/project.
uv build will first build a source distribution, and then build a binary distribution (wheel) from that source distribution.
You can limit uv build to building a source distribution with uv build --sdist, a binary distribution with uv build --wheel, or build both distributions from source with uv build --sdist --wheel.
uv build accepts --build-constraint, which can be used to constrain the versions of any build requirements during the build process. When coupled with --require-hashes, uv will enforce that the requirement used to build the project match specific, known hashes, for reproducibility.
For example, given the following constraints.txt:
setuptools==68.2.2 --hash=sha256:b454a35605876da60632df1a60f736524eb73cc47bbc9f3f1ef1b644de74fd2a
Running the following would build the project with the specified version of setuptools, and verify that the downloaded setuptools distribution matches the specified hash:
$ uv build --build-constraint constraints.txt --require-hashes
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