Python wheels are great. Building them across Mac, Linux, Windows, on multiple versions of Python, is not.
cibuildwheel is here to help. cibuildwheel runs on your CI server - currently it supports GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, and GitLab CI - and it builds and tests your wheels across all of your platforms.
| macOS Intel | macOS Apple Silicon | Windows 64bit | Windows 32bit | Windows Arm64 | manylinux musllinux x86_64 |
manylinux musllinux i686 |
manylinux musllinux aarch64 |
manylinux musllinux ppc64le |
manylinux musllinux s390x |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPython 3.6 | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CPython 3.7 | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CPython 3.8 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CPython 3.9 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅² | ✅³ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CPython 3.10 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅² | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| PyPy 3.7 v7.3 | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅¹ | ✅¹ | ✅¹ | N/A | N/A |
| PyPy 3.8 v7.3 | ✅ | N/A | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅¹ | ✅¹ | ✅¹ | N/A | N/A |
¹ PyPy is only supported for manylinux wheels.
² Windows arm64 support is experimental.
³ Alpine 3.14 and very briefly 3.15's default python3 was not able to load musllinux wheels. This has been fixed; please upgrade the python package if using Alpine from before the fix.
- Builds manylinux, musllinux, macOS 10.9+, and Windows wheels for CPython and PyPy
- Works on GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, and GitLab CI
- Bundles shared library dependencies on Linux and macOS through auditwheel and delocate
- Runs your library's tests against the wheel-installed version of your library
See the cibuildwheel 1 documentation if you need to build unsupported versions of Python, such as Python 2.
cibuildwheel runs inside a CI service. Supported platforms depend on which service you're using:
| Linux | macOS | Windows | Linux ARM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅¹ |
| Azure Pipelines | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| Travis CI | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| AppVeyor | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | |
| CircleCI | ✅ | ✅ | ||
| Gitlab CI | ✅ |
¹ Requires emulation, distributed separately. Other services may also support Linux ARM through emulation or third-party build hosts, but these are not tested in our CI.
To build manylinux, musllinux, macOS, and Windows wheels on GitHub Actions, you could use this .github/workflows/wheels.yml:
name: Build
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
build_wheels:
name: Build wheels on ${{ matrix.os }}
runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
strategy:
matrix:
os: [ubuntu-20.04, windows-2019, macOS-10.15]
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
# Used to host cibuildwheel
- uses: actions/setup-python@v2
- name: Install cibuildwheel
run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.3.1
- name: Build wheels
run: python -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse
# to supply options, put them in 'env', like:
# env:
# CIBW_SOME_OPTION: value
- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
with:
path: ./wheelhouse/*.whlFor more information, including PyPI deployment, and the use of other CI services or the dedicated GitHub Action, check out the documentation and the examples.
| Option | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Build selection | CIBW_PLATFORM |
Override the auto-detected target platform |
CIBW_BUILD CIBW_SKIP |
Choose the Python versions to build | |
CIBW_ARCHS |
Change the architectures built on your machine by default. | |
CIBW_PROJECT_REQUIRES_PYTHON |
Manually set the Python compatibility of your project | |
CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS |
Enable building with pre-release versions of Python if available | |
| Build customization | CIBW_BUILD_FRONTEND |
Set the tool to use to build, either "pip" (default for now) or "build" |
CIBW_ENVIRONMENT |
Set environment variables needed during the build | |
CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_PASS_LINUX |
Set environment variables on the host to pass-through to the container during the build. | |
CIBW_BEFORE_ALL |
Execute a shell command on the build system before any wheels are built. | |
CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD |
Execute a shell command preparing each wheel's build | |
CIBW_REPAIR_WHEEL_COMMAND |
Execute a shell command to repair each (non-pure Python) built wheel | |
CIBW_MANYLINUX_*_IMAGECIBW_MUSLLINUX_*_IMAGE |
Specify alternative manylinux / musllinux Docker images | |
CIBW_DEPENDENCY_VERSIONS |
Specify how cibuildwheel controls the versions of the tools it uses | |
| Testing | CIBW_TEST_COMMAND |
Execute a shell command to test each built wheel |
CIBW_BEFORE_TEST |
Execute a shell command before testing each wheel | |
CIBW_TEST_REQUIRES |
Install Python dependencies before running the tests | |
CIBW_TEST_EXTRAS |
Install your wheel for testing using extras_require | |
CIBW_TEST_SKIP |
Skip running tests on some builds | |
| Other | CIBW_BUILD_VERBOSITY |
Increase/decrease the output of pip wheel |
These options can be specified in a pyproject.toml file, as well; see configuration.
Here are some repos that use cibuildwheel.
| Name | CI | OS | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| scikit-learn |  |
   |
The machine learning library. A complex but clean config using many of cibuildwheel's features to build a large project with Cython and C++ extensions. |
| Tornado |  |
|
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. |
| pytorch-fairseq | |
|
Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python. |
| Matplotlib | |
|
The venerable Matplotlib, a Python library with C++ portions |
| MyPy | |
|
MyPyC, the compiled component of MyPy. |
| pydantic | |
|
Data parsing and validation using Python type hints |
| uvloop | |
|
Ultra fast asyncio event loop. |
| psutil | |
|
Cross-platform lib for process and system monitoring in Python |
| vaex | |
|
Out-of-Core hybrid Apache Arrow/NumPy DataFrame for Python, ML, visualization and exploration of big tabular data at a billion rows per second 🚀 |
| Google Benchmark | |
 |
A microbenchmark support library |
ℹ️ That's just a handful, there are many more! Check out the Working Examples page in the docs.
Since cibuildwheel repairs the wheel with delocate or auditwheel, it might automatically bundle dynamically linked libraries from the build machine.
It helps ensure that the library can run without any dependencies outside of the pip toolchain.
This is similar to static linking, so it might have some license implications. Check the license for any code you're pulling in to make sure that's allowed.
14 December 2021
- 🐛 Setting pip options like
PIP_USE_DEPRECATEDinCIBW_ENVIRONMENTno longer adversely affects cibuildwheel's ability to set up a Python environment (#956) - 📚 Docs fixes and improvements
26 November 2021
- 📈 cibuildwheel now defaults to manylinux2014 image for linux builds, rather than manylinux2010. If you want to stick with manylinux2010, it's simple to set this using the image options. (#926)
- ✨ You can now pass environment variables from the host machine into the Docker container during a Linux build. Check out the docs for
CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_PASS_LINUXfor the details. (#914) - ✨ Added support for building PyPy 3.8 wheels. (#881)
- ✨ Added support for building Windows arm64 CPython wheels on a Windows arm64 runner. We can't test this in CI yet, so for now, this is experimental. (#920)
- 📚 Improved the deployment documentation (#911)
- 🛠 Changed the escaping behaviour inside cibuildwheel's option placeholders e.g.
{project}inbefore_buildor{dest_dir}inrepair_wheel_command. This allows bash syntax like${SOME_VAR}to passthrough without being interpreted as a placeholder by cibuildwheel. See this section in the docs for more info. (#889) - 🛠 Pip updated to 21.3, meaning it now defaults to in-tree builds again. If this causes an issue with your project, setting environment variable
PIP_USE_DEPRECATED=out-of-tree-buildis available as a temporary flag to restore the old behaviour. However, be aware that this flag will probably be removed soon. (#881) - 🐛 You can now access the current Python interpreter using
python3within a build on Windows (#917)
26 October 2021
- 🐛 Fix bug in the GitHub Action step causing a syntax error (#895)
26 October 2021
- 🛠 Added a
config-fileoption on the GitHub Action to specify something other than pyproject.toml in your GitHub Workflow file. (#883) - 🐛 Fix missing resources in sdist and released wheel on PyPI. We've also made some internal changes to our release processes to make them more reliable. (#893, #894)
22 October 2021
-
🌟 Added support for musllinux. Support for this new wheel format lets projects build wheels for Linux distributions that use musl libc, notably, Alpine Docker containers. (#768)
Musllinux builds are enabled by default. If you're not ready to build musllinux, add
*-musllinux_*to yourCIBW_SKIP/skipoption. Or, you might have to make some changes to your options - to simplify that process, you can use... -
🌟 TOML option overrides! This provides much greater flexibility in configuration via pyproject.toml. (#854)
You can now set build options for any subset of your builds using a match pattern. So, for example, you can customise CPython 3.8 builds with an override on
cp38-*or musllinux builds by selecting*musllinux*. Check out the docs for more info on the specifics. -
🛠 Added support for building PyPy wheels on macOS 11 CI runners. (#875)
-
🛠 Setting an empty string for the
CIBW_*_IMAGEoption will now fallthrough to the config file or cibuildwheel's default, rather than causing an error. This makes the option easier to use in CI build matricies. (#829) -
🛠 Support for TOML 1.0 when reading config files, via the
tomlipackage. (#876)
Note: This version is not available on PyPI due to some missing resources in the release files. Please use a later version instead.
That's the last few versions.
ℹ️ Want more changelog? Head over to the changelog page in the docs.
For more info on how to contribute to cibuildwheel, see the docs.
Everyone interacting with the cibuildwheel project via codebase, issue tracker, chat rooms, or otherwise is expected to follow the PSF Code of Conduct.
- Joe Rickerby @joerick
- Yannick Jadoul @YannickJadoul
- Matthieu Darbois @mayeut
- Henry Schreiner @henryiii
cibuildwheel stands on the shoulders of giants.
- ⭐️ @matthew-brett for multibuild and matthew-brett/delocate
- @PyPA for the manylinux Docker images pypa/manylinux
- @ogrisel for wheelhouse-uploader and
run_with_env.cmd
Massive props also to-
- @zfrenchee for help debugging many issues
- @lelit for some great bug reports and contributions
- @mayeut for a phenomenal PR patching Python itself for better compatibility!
- @czaki for being a super-contributor over many PRs and helping out with countless issues!
- @mattip for his help with adding PyPy support to cibuildwheel
If you'd like to keep wheel building separate from the package itself, check out astrofrog/autowheel. It builds packages using cibuildwheel from source distributions on PyPI.
Another very similar tool to consider is matthew-brett/multibuild. multibuild is a shell script toolbox for building a wheel on various platforms. It is used as a basis to build some of the big data science tools, like SciPy.