Building Pyarrow with uv

Sometimes it can be tricky to figure out the right flags for a tool, I have seen that many people ran into issues, trying to use uv and pyarrow together (e.g. this commenter most likely). The error looks like this:

check.warn(importable)
  CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:289 (find_package):
    By not providing "FindArrow.cmake" in CMAKE_MODULE_PATH this project has
    asked CMake to find a package configuration file provided by "Arrow", but
    CMake did not find one.

    Could not find a package configuration file provided by "Arrow" with any of
    the following names:

      ArrowConfig.cmake
      arrow-config.cmake

    Add the installation prefix of "Arrow" to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH or set
    "Arrow_DIR" to a directory containing one of the above files.  If "Arrow"
    provides a separate development package or SDK, be sure it has been
    installed.


  error: command '/Users/timon/.nix-profile/bin/cmake' failed with exit code 1

A common use case is to build a Zip archive of your package, uv has a dedicated repo for that.

Here is how you can build pyarrow for a linux_x86_64 platform with uv.

uv pip install \
  --no-installer-metadata \
  --no-compile-bytecode \
  --python-platform x86_64-manylinux_2_28 \
  --python python3.14 \
  --target build \
  -r requirements.txt

The key here is to use x86_64-manylinux_2_28¹ and check the packages site on pypi to see for which platforms the package has pre-built wheels: pyarrow.

If you use a platform, which has no pre-built wheels, you will have to build the package from source. The error message above is about missing CMake (and a bunch of other things in my environment), but the reason for it, is that a wrong platform was used, which has no pre-built wheel e.g.: x16-linux-gnu.