Installation

Prose ships as a single native binary written in Rust, distributed as a Python wheel so the install path lands on PyPI with no separate toolchain. The binary runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, with no Python interpreter on the hot path. The recommended install is through uv, in that uv tool install fetches the platform wheel and exposes the prose executable on the user's PATH without an explicit venv.

Install

uv tool install prose-formatter

Two names are worth flagging up front. The PyPI distribution is prose-formatter, because the unqualified prose name was already claimed when the project shipped. The binary the wheel installs is prose, because that's the name a user types at the shell and a CI step writes into a workflow. Every later command in the documentation assumes the prose binary on PATH.

pip install prose-formatter and pipx install prose-formatter work the same way for users who prefer those package managers. The PyPI distribution is the same wheel in every case, so the install path is whatever fits the project's existing tooling.

Confirm the install with:

prose --version

Platforms

Pre-built wheels cover the following targets:

Triple	Platform
x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu	Linux x86_64 (glibc, manylinux)
aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu	Linux aarch64 (glibc, manylinux)
x86_64-apple-darwin	macOS Intel
aarch64-apple-darwin	macOS Apple Silicon
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc	Windows x86_64

A source distribution rides alongside the wheels for any target outside this matrix (musl-based Linux distros, FreeBSD, 32-bit architectures). Installing the sdist requires a Rust toolchain on the install host, because the installer builds the binary from source rather than fetching a pre-built artifact.

Python Compatibility

The install path needs Python 3.10 or newer, which is the lower bound declared in the wheel's requires-python metadata. The Python interpreter is used only by the installer (uv, pip, pipx) to land the binary on PATH, and the running formatter doesn't load it on the hot path. For the runtime version a project's source itself targets (read by

legacy-union-syntax

and

unused-future-annotations

when judging safety), see the target-version field in the Configuration reference.

Next Steps

The Quick Start chapter walks through the first prose format and prose check invocations. The Ruff integration page covers the ruff format && prose format recipe for projects that pair the two. The Configuration reference enumerates every per-rule knob. For shell completions, see Shell Completions under Integrations.