Overlap of typer and typer-slim causes package managemers to fail

[svlandeg]

Discussed in #1501

^{Originally posted by konstin January 26, 2026}

First Check

• I added a very descriptive title here.
• I used the GitHub search to find a similar question and didn't find it.
• I searched the Typer documentation, with the integrated search.
• I already searched in Google "How to X in Typer" and didn't find any information.
• I already read and followed all the tutorials in the docs and didn't find an answer.
• I already checked if it is not related to Typer but to Click.

Commit to Help

• I commit to help with one of those options 👆

Example Code

virtualenv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install typer
pip install typer-slim
python -c "import typer" # OK
pip uninstall typer # We got typer-slim, no need to have typer too
python -c "import typer" # ERROR

# MRE for uv: https://github.com/pimlock/uv-bug-repro

Description

This is the upstream version of astral-sh/uv#17645. When a user has both typer and typer-slim in their dependency tree, one will overwrite the other, with the consequence that uninstalling one will partially uninstall the other.

This is a problem with both pip and uv. Python package management doesn't support packages overlapping, depending on the installer it may even lead to corrupted files (parallel writing to the same files). Since a dependency tree may include both typer and typer-slim, those conflicts can happen silently, leading to hard-to-debug package management errors that only show up as runtime crashes.

I read #786 but unfortunately I don't follow why both packages include the same files, instead of only one package.

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More of a meta comment, but I was surprised there is no dedicated bug reporting option, but only the funnel into the question flow.

Operating System

Linux

Operating System Details

Ubuntu 22.04

Typer Version

0.21.1

Python Version

3.14.0

Additional Context

No response

[tiangolo]

To give more context on why typer-slim exists, when I added that, my intention was that most people should have the default behavior with nice things by default, e.g. help menus with colors provided by Rich, but I wanted to give a way for people to opt out of it if for some reason they didn't want to have the extra packages (e.g. Rich and Shellingham).

One option was to make regular users explicitly opt in to get what should be the default behavior, with an extra package "typer[standard]" that they would have to install... so in many cases (probably most) they just wouldn't get the nice things by default because they wouldn't remember to install the specific extra. Also, it requires explaining more, needs quotes when installing or otherwise breaks in Zsh, etc. It's also more difficult to explain and use things like https://uvx.sh/, etc.

So, the other option, was to have typer have the nice things by default, but provide an escape hatch to opt out of that, that's what typer-slim is.

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I did the same thing for FastAPI, and it failed quite quickly with the same problems. It just hadn't been reported (or I hadn't noted it) here.

I want to run a Typer survey, will do that soon, to check how people are using Typer and figure out if there are any convincing use cases where people install typer-slim because for some reason they want to explicitly avoid Rich... I don't really expect many convincing arguments, then I would plan on making typer-slim just depend on typer and not expose any code or entrypoints, it would be an empty package with a single dependency.

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In case anyone else ends arriving here to read, this is just some extra context with what is in my mind right now, not a promise of what will happen, there are more things to check. 😅

But definitely, the current state is not good, so we need to fix it.

[svlandeg]

Related issue of encountering problems when installing typer-slim into an environment that already has typer: #1512. In this particular case, an OSError/PermissionError was raised when the "typer" files were being removed to install typer-slim (but they are the same files, which is the core of this issue as well).