TL;DR: pyx is a Python-native package registry — and the first piece of the Astral platform, our next-generation infrastructure for the Python ecosystem.
We think of pyx as an optimized backend for uv: it’s a package registry, but it also solves problems that go beyond the scope of a traditional "package registry”, making your Python experience faster, more secure, and even GPU-aware, both for private packages and public sources (like PyPI and the PyTorch index).
pyx is live with our early partners, including Ramp, Intercom, and fal. If you're interested in a next-generation Python experience for your team: get in touch today.
At Astral, we build high-performance developer tools for the Python ecosystem. We're best known for Ruff, our linter and formatter, and uv, our package manager.
I started this company because Python felt under-served: the most popular programming ecosystem on Earth was succeeding in spite of its tooling.
Over the past two years, Python's growth has only accelerated — and in parallel, our tools have seen unprecedented adoption, with over 100 million installs per month across the Astral toolchain and uv powering over 500 million requests per day. The amount of Python code in the world is increasing at an astounding rate, and our tools are powering those workloads.
Our goal is to make Python the most productive programming ecosystem on Earth, and our open source tools have been driven by that unifying vision. But there are limits to what we can do with client-side tools alone. We want to expand the scope of problems we can solve — beyond command-line tools and into our own end-to-end infrastructure. We want to build a Python cloud: a set of unified services that make Python fast, easy, and robust, extending the work and principles we've built upon in our open source toolchain.
We're starting with pyx, a Python-native package registry. It's the first piece of the Astral platform: our next-generation infrastructure for the Python ecosystem.
We think of pyx as an optimized backend for uv: it's a package registry, but it also solves problems that go beyond the scope of a traditional "package registry," making your uv experience faster, more secure, and even GPU-aware. You can use it to host your own internal packages, or as an accelerated, configurable frontend to public sources like PyPI and the PyTorch index.
When used with uv, pyx should feel like the same leap in developer experience that you felt when migrating to uv in the first place.
Much of the inspiration for pyx comes from the classes of problems we see in the uv issue tracker (and in conversations with enterprises) that we can't solve with a client alone — but could solve with a server. For example:
- "Why is it so hard to install PyTorch, or CUDA, or libraries like FlashAttention or DeepSpeed that build against PyTorch and CUDA?"
- "Why is everyone on my team re-building the same packages over and over again on their machines?"
- "Why did the latest setuptools release break our build? Can't we harden against that?"
- "Why is it such a pain to authenticate against our internal registry?"
By vertically integrating our client (uv) and server (pyx), we can solve these problems — all of them. And by tapping into the rest of our open source toolchain, we can get even more ambitious over time. Imagine a package registry that has a semantic, type-level understanding, not only of your own code, but of your dependencies and supply-chain too; then extend that line of thinking to the rest of your Python infrastructure.
You won't need to use pyx to use uv, and you won't need to use uv to use pyx. But when used together, entire classes of problems disappear. Our deep focus on and understanding of Python enables us to build better solutions than anything else out there; and deep integration with our open source tools enables us to build experiences that otherwise wouldn't be possible at all.
Beyond the product itself, pyx is also an instantiation of our strategy: our tools (uv, Ruff, ty, etc.) remain free, open source, and permissively licensed — forever. Nothing changes there. Instead, we'll offer paid, hosted services like pyx that represent the "natural next thing you need" when you're already using our tools: the Astral platform.
pyx is not yet generally available. We've been building it out over the past few months, and are now live with our early partners, including Ramp, Intercom, and fal. As much as we can, though, we want to build in the open. The fast feedback loops that we get from building in open source are a huge part of our ability to solve real user problems.
As we harden the product and prepare for GA, we'd love to hear from you. If you're interested in a next-generation Python experience for your team — if the problems above resonate with you, or even if you're just a fan of our work: get in touch today.
