Is there a way to disable the browser open behavior?

[zanieb]

Background

Over in uv, we need to invoke interpreters when discovering them on the system. We have a report at astral-sh/uv#15707 that running a command that discovers interpreters (e.g., uv python list) opens their browser.

Details

I'm a little wary of this behavior in general and maybe there should be heuristics about whether this is appropriate. The smallest change would probably be to add an environment variable uv could set at query-time to disable this?

I briefly looked at the documentation and didn't see anything about configuring this, but I didn't poke around the source code.

[dalito]

It looks like this was fixed in the latest release (#157). Version 25.0b13 (AKA 25.0.189.0) still had the issue, version 25.0b14 (AKA 25.0.190.0) fixed it.

I wonder how the automatic update described in the Python Windows help page is supposed to work. How is it triggered? It did not update for me from b13 to b14.

[zanieb]

Oh so it was pymanager.exe that exhibits this behavior and it was being installed as python.exe incorrectly?

[zooba]

Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

The automatic update only applies to the MSIX, and will either trigger automatically by the OS within 24 hours of a release going up (if you have network access), or triggered through the Store app if you installed it that way. The MSI doesn't do automatic update (we should probably document that more clearly under one of the "you probably don't want this one" warnings).

[zooba]

For use in uv (assuming you're finding and using pymanager.exe or py.exe directly), you probably want to set %PYTHON_MANAGER_CONFIRM%=False to disable confirmations, which should prevent the browser from opening. But also, passing any arguments at all to those commands should do it as well. The python.exe command shouldn't be affected, that was definitely a bug that we fixed.

[zanieb]

We were finding python.exe, so I think we're no longer affected. If we ever query the pymanager.exe or py.exe, I'll keep that option in mind! Thanks!