[JimDabell]

The philosophy of uv is that the venv is ephemeral; creating a new venv should be fast enough that you can do it on demand.

Do you have a standalone script or do you have a project? --script is for standalone scripts. You don’t use it with projects.

If you tell it to run a standalone script, it will construct the venv itself on the fly in $XDG_CACHE_HOME.

If you have a project, then it will look in the .venv/ subdirectory by default and you can change this with the $UV_PROJECT_ENVIRONMENT environment variable. If it doesn’t find an environment where it is expecting to, it will construct one.