What is taipan?

taipan is a tool that lets you run Python scripts on a computer that does not have Python installed at all. It ships as a single executable file, about 31 megabytes, with a working copy of CPython 3.13 built directly inside it, so there is nothing else to install before running a script. Beyond simply running scripts, taipan understands PEP 723, a standard way of listing a script's dependencies directly inside the file itself using a special comment block. When you run such a script, taipan installs the listed packages using a tool called uv and caches the result, so running the same script again, or a different script with the same dependencies, reuses that cached environment instead of reinstalling anything. This makes repeated runs very fast, around ten milliseconds to start according to the project's own benchmarks. taipan can also package a script together with its dependencies and the Python interpreter into one standalone executable using the taipan build command. The resulting file runs on a matching machine with no Python, no internet connection, and no extra tools required, which is useful for distributing a script to a computer that is locked down or has no network access. Internally, the embedded Python interpreter and its standard library are extracted to a local cache the first time the binary runs, and later runs read a small footer to verify the file has not been tampered with or truncated before reusing that cache. taipan installs are not currently locked to exact versions, so it is recommended to pin dependency versions directly in the PEP 723 block for reproducible results. It currently requires a glibc based Linux system, or macOS or Windows, and does not yet support Alpine Linux's musl based systems. It is not meant to replace project management tools like uv for larger projects with lockfiles and multiple Python versions.