cibuildwheel

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.

What does it do?

	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	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
CPython 3.11	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
CPython 3.12⁵	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
PyPy 3.7 v7.3	✅	N/A	✅	N/A	N/A	✅¹	✅¹	✅¹	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.8 v7.3	✅	✅⁴	✅	N/A	N/A	✅¹	✅¹	✅¹	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.9 v7.3	✅	✅⁴	✅	N/A	N/A	✅¹	✅¹	✅¹	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.10 v7.3	✅	✅⁴	✅	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.}
^{⁴ Cross-compilation not supported with PyPy - to build these wheels you need to run cibuildwheel on an Apple Silicon machine.}
^{⁵ CPython 3.12 is built by default using Python RCs, starting with cibuildwheel 2.15.}

Builds manylinux, musllinux, macOS 10.9+, and Windows wheels for CPython and PyPy
Works on GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, CircleCI, GitLab CI, and Cirrus 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.

Usage

cibuildwheel runs inside a CI service. Supported platforms depend on which service you're using:

	Linux	macOS	Windows	Linux ARM	macOS ARM	Windows ARM
GitHub Actions	✅	✅	✅	✅¹	✅²	✅⁴
Azure Pipelines	✅	✅	✅		✅²	✅⁴
Travis CI	✅		✅	✅
AppVeyor	✅	✅	✅		✅²	✅⁴
CircleCI	✅	✅		✅	✅²
Gitlab CI	✅		✅	✅¹
Cirrus CI	✅	✅³	✅	✅	✅

^{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.}
^{² Uses cross-compilation. It is not possible to test arm64 and the arm64 part of a universal2 wheel on this CI platform.}
^{³ Uses cross-compilation. Thanks to Rosetta 2 emulation, it is possible to test x86_64 and both parts of a universal2 wheel on this CI platform.}
^{⁴ Uses cross-compilation. It is not possible to test arm64 on this CI platform.}

Example setup

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-11]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      # Used to host cibuildwheel
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v3

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.16.4

      - 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@v4
        with:
          name: cibw-wheels-${{ matrix.os }}-${{ strategy.job-index }}
          path: ./wheelhouse/*.whl

For more information, including PyPI deployment, and the use of other CI services or the dedicated GitHub Action, check out the documentation and the examples.

How it works

The following diagram summarises the steps that cibuildwheel takes on each platform.

^{Explore an interactive version of this diagram in the docs.}

Options

	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 built wheel
	`CIBW_MANYLINUX__IMAGE` `CIBW_MUSLLINUX__IMAGE`	Specify alternative manylinux / musllinux Docker images
	`CIBW_CONTAINER_ENGINE`	Specify which container engine to use when building Linux wheels
	`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.

Working examples

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.
pytorch-fairseq			Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
NumPy			The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
Tornado			Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Uses stable ABI for a small C extension.
Matplotlib			The venerable Matplotlib, a Python library with C++ portions
NCNN			ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference framework optimized for the mobile platform
Prophet			Tool for producing high quality forecasts for time series data that has multiple seasonality with linear or non-linear growth.
MyPy			The compiled version of MyPy using MyPyC.
Kivy			Open source UI framework written in Python, running on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS
duckdb			DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP Database Management System

ℹ️ That's just a handful, there are many more! Check out the Working Examples page in the docs.

Legal note

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.

Changelog

v2.16.4

28 January 2024

🛠 Update manylinux pins to upgrade from a problematic PyPy version. (#1737)

v2.16.3

26 January 2024

🐛 Fix a bug when building from sdist, where relative paths to files in the package didn't work because the working directory was wrong (#1687)
🛠 Adds the ability to disable mounting the host filesystem in containers to /host, through the disable_host_mount suboption on CIBW_CONTAINER_ENGINE.
📚 A lot of docs improvements! (#1708, #1705, #1686, #1679, #1667, #1665)

v2.16.2

3 October 2023

🛠 Updates CPython 3.12 version to 3.12.0, final release (#1635)
✨ Adds a debug option CIBW_DEBUG_KEEP_CONTAINER to stop cibuildwheel deleting build containers after the build finishes. (#1620)
📚 Adds support for [tool.cibuildwheel] checking by adding a schema compatible with the validate-pyproject tool (#1622, #1628, #1629)
🐛 Fix parsing of CIBW_CONTAINER_ENGINE and CIBW_BUILD_FRONTEND options to not break arguments on : characters (#1621)
🐛 Fix the evaluation order of CIBW_ENVIRONMENT and CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_PASS so that CIBW_ENVIRONMENT assignments can reference environment variables passed through from the host machine. (#1617)
🛠 Supports manylinux images' deferred installation of interpreters through the manylinux-interpreters tool (#1630)

v2.16.1

26 September 2023

🛠 Updates the prerelease CPython 3.12 version to 3.12.0rc3 (#1625)
🛠 Only calls linux32 in containers when necessary (#1599)

v2.16.0

18 September 2023

✨ Add the ability to pass additional flags to a build frontend through the CIBW_BUILD_FRONTEND option (#1588).
✨ The environment variable SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH is now automatically passed through to container Linux builds (useful for reproducible builds!) (#1589)
🛠 Updates the prerelease CPython 3.12 version to 3.12.0rc2 (#1604)
🐛 Fix requires_python auto-detection from setup.py when the call to setup() is within an if __name__ == "__main__" block (#1613)
🐛 Fix a bug that prevented building Linux wheels in Docker on a Windows host (#1573)
🐛 --only can now select prerelease-pythons (#1564)
📚 Docs & examples updates (#1582, #1593, #1598, #1615)

That's the last few versions.

ℹ️ Want more changelog? Head over to the changelog page in the docs.

Contributing

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.

Maintainers

Joe Rickerby @joerick
Yannick Jadoul @YannickJadoul
Matthieu Darbois @mayeut
Henry Schreiner @henryiii
Grzegorz Bokota @Czaki

Credits

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

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README.md

README.md

cibuildwheel

What does it do?

Usage

Example setup

How it works

Options

Working examples

Legal note

Changelog

v2.16.4

v2.16.3

v2.16.2

v2.16.1

v2.16.0

Contributing

Maintainers

Credits

See also

Files

README.md

Latest commit

History

README.md

File metadata and controls

cibuildwheel

What does it do?

Usage

Example setup

How it works

Options

Working examples

Legal note

Changelog

v2.16.4

v2.16.3

v2.16.2

v2.16.1

v2.16.0

Contributing

Maintainers

Credits

See also