Make "uv self update" friendlier

[ichoosetoaccept]

Summary

I have uv installed via Homebrew. When I run uf self update the output currently is: error: uv was installed through an external package manager, and self-update is not available. Please use your package manager to update uv.

Makes sense--no surprise there.

What I'm proposing is for uv to be friendlier about this. uv could internally check (say, with which uv) how it was installed and then tell the user to use brew update && brew upgrade uv in my case.

Naturally this would need to be adapted to all ways uv can be installed and to all possible OSes uv is available on.

I'm on macOS 26.1 and I use

uv --version
uv 0.9.11 (Homebrew 2025-11-20)

This is squarely in "nitpick territory" and most definitely a minor thing but worth considering 🙂.

Cheers!

Example

Example, for command uv self update

print

You installed uv using Homebrew (https://brew.sh). To update uv, please run
brew update && brew upgrade uv.