We automate OSX wheel building using this custom github repository that builds on the travis-ci OSX machines.
The travis-ci interface for the builds is : https://travis-ci.org/MacPython/matplotlib-wheels
The driving github repository is : https://github.com/MacPython/matplotlib-wheels
The wheel-building repository:
- does a fresh build of the required C / C++ libraries;
- builds a matplotlib wheel, linking against these fresh builds;
- processes the wheel using delocate. delocate copies the required dynamic libraries into the wheel and relinks the extension modules against the copied libraries;
- uploads the built wheel to http://wheels.scipy.org (a Rackspace container kindly donated by Rackspace to scikit-learn).
The resulting wheel is therefore self-contained and does not need any external dynamic libraries apart from those provided as standard by OSX.
The .travis.yml file in this repository has a line containing the API key
for the Rackspace container encrypted with an RSA key that is unique to the
repository - see http://docs.travis-ci.com/user/encryption-keys. This
encrypted key gives the travis build permission to upload to the Rackspace
directory pointed to by http://wheels.scipy.org.
You will need write permission to the github repository to trigger new builds on the travis-ci interface. Contact us on the mailing list if you need this.
You can trigger a build by:
- making a commit to the matplotlib-wheels repository (e.g. with git commit --allow-empty); or
- clicking on the circular arrow icon towards the top right of the travis-ci page, to rerun the previous build.
In general, it is better to trigger a build with a commit, because this makes a new set of build products and logs, keeping the old ones for reference. Keeping the old build logs helps us keep track of previous problems and successful builds.
By default, the matplotlib-wheels repository is usually set up to build the latest git tag. By "latest" we mean the tag on the branch most recently branched from master - see http://stackoverflow.com/a/24557377/1939576. To check whether you are building the latest tag have a look around line 5 of .travis.yml in the matplotlib-wheels repository. You should see something like:
- BUILD_COMMIT='latest-tag'
If this is commented out, then the repository is set up to build the current commit in the matplotlib submodule of the repository. If it is set to another value then it will be specifying a commit to build.
You can therefore build any arbitrary commit by specifying the commit hash or branch name or tag name in this line of the .travis.yml file.
Be careful, http://wheels.scipy.org points to a container on a distributed content delivery network. It can take up to 15 minutes for the new wheel file to get updated into the container at http://wheels.scipy.org.
When the wheels are updated, you can of course just download them to your machine manually, and then upload them manually to pypi, or by using twine. You can also use a script for doing this, housed at : https://github.com/MacPython/terryfy/blob/master/wheel-uploader
You'll need twine and beautiful soup 4.
You will typically have a directory on your machine where you store wheels, called a wheelhouse. The typical call for wheel-uploader would then be something like:
wheel-uploader -v -w ~/wheelhouse matplotlib 1.5.0
where:
- -v means give verbose messages;
- -w ~/wheelhouse means download the wheels from https://wheels.scipy.org to the directory ~/wheelhouse;
- matplotlib is the root name of the wheel(s) to download / upload;
- 1.5.0 is the version to download / upload.
So, in this case, wheel-uploader will download all wheels starting with matplotlib-1.5.0- from http://wheels.scipy.org to ~/wheelhouse, then upload them to pypi.
Of course, you will need permissions to upload to pypi, for this to work.