{"slug": "python-build-standalone", "name": "python-build-standalone", "category": "dev-libs", "category_name": "Libraries and frameworks", "description": "", "recommenders": 3, "commenters": 6, "warners": 1, "score": 2.506, "rising": 0.35, "first": "2026-03-19", "latest": "2026-10-10", "why": "the project has really saved me a great deal of toil over the past year or two since adopting it", "why_is_quote": true, "has_verdict": false, "sentiment": {"recommend": 3, "neutral": 2, "compare": 0, "warn": 1}, "spark": [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1], "listed": true, "loved": [], "caveat": "", "short_quote": "the project has really saved me a great deal of toil over the past year or two since adopting it", "kind": "", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone", "official_url": "https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone", "pricing": "", "aliases": ["python-build-standalone"], "verdict": null, "praise": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 800472096, "item_id": 50029506, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029506", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-10-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You can in fact get them in pretty much that form", "excerpt": "> If python interpreters masqueraded as versioned .so libraries You can in fact get them in pretty much that form (of course they also include a ton of .py files for the standard library); see https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone .", "context": "", "use_case": "Standalone Python builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Python 3.15"}, {"id": 785205632, "item_id": 49075352, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075352", "by": "gooseyard", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the project has really saved me a great deal of toil over the past year or two since adopting it", "excerpt": "At my employer, we'd been using a similar scheme to build and ship interpreters along with releases of various pieces of software for years. Although I was interested in p-b-s for some time, I was loathe to consider switching to it since one of the major motivations for building our own binaries was the collection of random obscure changes or customizations we'd accumulated in our build harness over the years, and th", "context": "uses it at their employer", "use_case": "building and shipping Python interpreters", "switched_from": "in-house interpreter builder", "story": "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions"}, {"id": 785194288, "item_id": 49074643, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074643", "by": "simonw", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "These distributions are excellent.", "excerpt": "These distributions are excellent. Astral took over maintenance of them a while ago so technically they sit under OpenAI now. https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone If you're looking to bundle Python into another application - a macOS desktop app for example - these are exactly what you need.", "context": "", "use_case": "bundling Python into applications", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "", "summary": "", "quotes": [{"id": 767469795, "item_id": 47966862, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966862", "by": "auraham", "date": "2026-04-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Not so sure how secure is that.", "excerpt": "This week I was wondering whether using uv for managing Python versions is a good idea. From their website [1] > Python does not publish official distributable binaries. As such, uv uses distributions from the Astral python-build-standalone project. See the Python distributions documentation for more details. It points to this GitHub repo https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone which mentions this other ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library"}]}], "who": [{"by": "gooseyard", "context": "uses it at their employer", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075352", "date": "2026-07-27"}], "tags": [], "use_cases": ["standalone python builds", "building and shipping python interpreters", "bundling python into applications"], "compared": [{"slug": "uv", "name": "uv", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 785200321, "item_id": 49075020, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075020", "by": "charliermarsh", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "when you install Python with uv, you're installing from python-build-standalone.", "excerpt": "These are the Python distributions we use in uv (https://github.com/astral-sh/uv), i.e., when you install Python with uv, you're installing from python-build-standalone. (Same goes for many of the other tools that can install Python for you, like pipx, Hatch, Poetry, Bazel, etc.) Most of our engineering time on the project over the past ~year and a half has been split into three buckets: 1. Keeping up with upstream C", "context": "maintainer", "use_case": "portable Python distributions", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073942", "title": "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47964617", "title": "Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50021127", "title": "Python 3.15", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47438716", "title": "OpenAI to Acquire Astral", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-04": {"warn": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 2}, "2026-08": {}, "2026-09": {}, "2026-10": {"recommend": 1}}, "quotes": [{"id": 800472096, "item_id": 50029506, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50029506", "by": "zahlman", "date": "2026-10-10", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "You can in fact get them in pretty much that form", "excerpt": "> If python interpreters masqueraded as versioned .so libraries You can in fact get them in pretty much that form (of course they also include a ton of .py files for the standard library); see https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone .", "context": "", "use_case": "Standalone Python builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Python 3.15"}, {"id": 785205632, "item_id": 49075352, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075352", "by": "gooseyard", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "the project has really saved me a great deal of toil over the past year or two since adopting it", "excerpt": "At my employer, we'd been using a similar scheme to build and ship interpreters along with releases of various pieces of software for years. Although I was interested in p-b-s for some time, I was loathe to consider switching to it since one of the major motivations for building our own binaries was the collection of random obscure changes or customizations we'd accumulated in our build harness over the years, and th", "context": "uses it at their employer", "use_case": "building and shipping Python interpreters", "switched_from": "in-house interpreter builder", "story": "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions"}, {"id": 785194288, "item_id": 49074643, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49074643", "by": "simonw", "date": "2026-07-27", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "These distributions are excellent.", "excerpt": "These distributions are excellent. Astral took over maintenance of them a while ago so technically they sit under OpenAI now. https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone If you're looking to bundle Python into another application - a macOS desktop app for example - these are exactly what you need.", "context": "", "use_case": "bundling Python into applications", "switched_from": "", "story": "Self-contained highly-portable Python distributions"}, {"id": 767477136, "item_id": 47967321, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47967321", "by": "woodruffw", "date": "2026-04-30", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "python-build-standalone fetches CPython sources directly from python.org", "excerpt": "> If I understand correctly, the source code for building Python is not fetched directly from python.org. Not so sure how secure is that. python-build-standalone fetches CPython sources directly from python.org[1]. I don't even know where else we would get them from! [1]: https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone/blob/a21e242a2521c3054867a1cc531b88ef555af366/pythonbuild/downloads.py", "context": "", "use_case": "standalone Python builds", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library"}, {"id": 767469795, "item_id": 47966862, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47966862", "by": "auraham", "date": "2026-04-30", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Not so sure how secure is that.", "excerpt": "This week I was wondering whether using uv for managing Python versions is a good idea. From their website [1] > Python does not publish official distributable binaries. As such, uv uses distributions from the Astral python-build-standalone project. See the Python distributions documentation for more details. It points to this GitHub repo https://github.com/astral-sh/python-build-standalone which mentions this other ", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Shai-Hulud Themed Malware Found in the PyTorch Lightning AI Training Library"}, {"id": 759057332, "item_id": 47441083, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47441083", "by": "fortuitous-frog", "date": "2026-03-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "uses indygreg's python-build-standalone", "excerpt": "Curious how well upstream contributors or projects get contributed for these sort of headline-gathering acquisitions (probably not at all, unfortunately). OpenClaw notably was built around Mario Zechner's pi[0]; uv I believe was highly adapted from Armin Ronacher's rye[1], and uses indygreg's python-build-standalone[2] for distributing Python builds (both of which were eventually transferred to Astral). [0]: https://", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenAI to Acquire Astral"}]}