I like to add `--upgrade-deps` as well. This automatically updates pip and setuptools within the venv after creation.

Didn't know about this .. thanks!

Completely agree

Exactly. People complain about Python's package management story, but for 99% of use cases a workflow that consists of Python's built-in venv, pip, requirements.txt, and constraints.txt is completely fine.

Even more if you use the legendary "pip-chill" to trim down the requirements file ;-)

Sorry. Shameless plug.

Poetry tracks your direct vs transient dependencies for you, and poetry run is stateless and easier to work with than a stateful activated venv

Or `uv venv`, `uv pip install` for a free, pretty extreme speedup. https://github.com/astral-sh/uv/

To save 4 seconds when installing dependencies?

My work saw a 5x speedup (~2min to ~20s) with a cold cache and like 200-500x (~20s to <0.1s) with a hot cache in our CI pipelines when we switched to uv.