Installation

Prose is a single native binary, written in Rust and published on PyPI as a Python wheel, so installing it needs no Rust toolchain. Pre-built wheels cover Linux, macOS, and Windows, and the formatter runs with no Python interpreter on the hot path. The recommended installer is uv, whose uv tool install downloads the wheel for your platform and puts the prose executable on your PATH with no virtual environment to manage.

Install

uv tool install prose-formatter

The package name and the executable name differ, and both appear throughout the documentation. The PyPI distribution is prose-formatter, because the name prose was already taken on PyPI when the project first published. The executable the wheel installs is prose, which is what you type at a shell and write into a CI step. Every later command assumes prose is on your PATH.

pip install prose-formatter and pipx install prose-formatter install the same wheel, so use whichever package manager the project already uses.

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 x86_64
aarch64-apple-darwin	🍎 macOS aarch64
x86_64-pc-windows-msvc	🪟 Windows x86_64
aarch64-pc-windows-msvc	🪟 Windows aarch64

A source distribution is published beside the wheels for any other target (musl-based Linux distributions, FreeBSD, 32-bit architectures). Installing from the source distribution needs a Rust toolchain on the machine, because the installer compiles the binary rather than downloading one.

Python Compatibility

Installing needs Python 3.10 or newer, the lower bound the wheel declares in its requires-python metadata. Only the installer (uv, pip, or pipx) uses that interpreter, to place the binary on PATH, and the formatter itself never loads the interpreter. The Python version a project's own code targets is a separate setting, the target-version key in the Configuration reference, which the version-gated rules read before rewriting anything.

Next Steps

• The Quick Start chapter walks through the first prose format and prose check commands.
• The Ruff integration page covers running Ruff in the same project.
• The Configuration reference lists every top-level key and every per-rule facet.
• Shell Completions under Integrations installs tab completion for the prose command.