python-winbuilder

Tool to setup a build environment on Windows for Python projects with compiled extensions using Carl Kleffner's MinGW static compiler toolchain.

This project can be used in the following contexts:

• setting up a build environment under Windows for AppVeyor CI,
• setting up a build environment under Linux & Wine for Travis CI,
• setting up a docker-based Linux + Wine local build and debug environment.

Operations

Here is the sequence of operations that are automated by the pywinbuilder tool:

1. Install Python using the official .msi installers of Python.org if needed,
2. Install pip using get-pip.py,
3. Download and extract the mingw-w64-for-python archive,
4. Generate the libpythonXX.dll.a and install it in the Python libs folder,
5. Copy libmsvcr90.a or libmsvr100.a into the Python libs folder,
6. Enable the correct specs file for mingw depending on the Python version,
7. Select mingw as the default compiler in distutils.cfg
8. Install a workaround for issue 4709 in distutils.cfg (Python 2.7 64 bit only).

Install

As usual:

pip install python-winbuilder

Alternatively you can just download the pywinbuilder.py script and replace python -m pywinbuilder with python pywinbuilder.py in the following usage examples.

Windows usage

SET PYTHON_HOME=C:\Python34-x64
SET PYTHON_VERSION=3.4.2
SET ARCH=64
SET MINGW_HOME=C:\mingw-static
python -m pywinbuilder

Then you can activate the build environment matching this configuration by changing the PATH environment variable and proceeding with building and testing your own code as usual:

set PATH=%PYTHON_HOME%;%PYTHON_HOME%\\Scripts;%MINGW_HOME%\\bin;%PATH%
cd my-python-project
python setup.py build_ext -i
pip install nose
nosetests .

See the appveyor.yml file for a more complete example.

Linux usage

This requires wine 1.6+:

export PYTHON_HOME="C:\\Python34-x64"
export PYTHON_VERSION="3.4.2"
export ARCH="64"
export MINGW_HOME="C:\\mingw-static"
python -m pywinbuilder

See the .travis.yml file for a more complete example.

It is also possible to pass a custom WINEPREFIX environment variable to isolate several build environment for different versions of Python and architectures on the same host.

Docker usage

You can use docker to run a Linux container with Wine and mingw-based build environments for many versions of Python at once. Run a new interactive session with:

docker run -t -i -v ~/code:/code ogrisel/python-winbuilder bash

Note that this is mounting the ~/code folder of your host operating system into the /code folder of your container. This makes it possible to access the source code of the project you want to build.

In that session you can use:

WINEPREFIX=/wine/wine-py2.7.8-64 wineconsole --backend=curses cmd

to launch an interactive Windows cmd session for a given version of Python and architecture. In that session you can build and test your code as you would do under Windows.

cd Z:\code\my-project
python -m pip install -f requirements.txt
python setup.py build_ext -i

python -m pip install nose
nosetests .

Use exit to end the cmd session.

Note the use of python -m pip install instead of the usual pip install command that does not seem to work under Wine for some unknown reason.

See the pywinbuilder.yml configuration file for the list of available Python versions.

You can rebuild the container with:

docker build -t ogrisel/python-winbuilder .

Dockerfile for the details on how this container is configured.