Building and uploading nipy wheels

We automate wheel building using this custom github repository that builds on the travis-ci macOS machines and the travis-ci Linux machines.

The travis-ci interface for the builds is https://travis-ci.org/MacPython/nipy-wheels

Appveyor interface at https://ci.appveyor.com/project/matthew-brett/nipy-wheels

The driving github repository is https://github.com/MacPython/nipy-wheels

How it works

The wheel-building repository:

does a fresh build of any required C / C++ libraries;
builds a nipy wheel, linking against these fresh builds;
processes the wheel using delocate (macOS) or auditwheel repair (Manylinux1). delocate and auditwheel copy the required dynamic libraries into the wheel and relinks the extension modules against the copied libraries;
uploads the built wheels to http://anaconda.org/nipy/nipy

The resulting wheels are therefore self-contained and do not need any external dynamic libraries apart from those provided as standard by macOS / Linux as defined by the manylinux1 standard.

The .travis.yml file in this repository has a line containing the API key for the Anaconda.org organization 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 Anaconda.org directory pointed to by https://anaconda.org/nipy/nipy .

Triggering a build

You will likely want to edit the .travis.yml and appveyor.yml files to specify the BUILD_COMMIT before triggering a build - see below.

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 nipy-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.

Which nipy commit does the repository build?

The nipy-wheels repository will build the commit specified in the BUILD_COMMIT at the top of the .travis.yml and appveyor.yml files. This can be any naming of a commit, including branch name, tag name or commit hash.

Uploading the built wheels to pypi

When the wheels are updated, you can download them to your machine manually, and then upload them manually to pypi, or by using twine.

To download, use something like:

python tools/download-wheels.py 0.5.0 --staging-url=https://anaconda.org/nipy/nipy --prefix=nipy -w wheelhouse

where 0.5.0 is the release version.

You may want to add the sdist to the wheelhouse. Build, copy with:

(cd nipy && make source-release)
cp nipy/dist/*.tar.gz wheelhouse

Then upload everything with:

twine upload --sign wheelhouse/nipy-0.5.0-*

In order to use Twine, you will need something like this in your ~/.pypirc file:

[distutils]
index-servers =
    pypi

[pypi]
username:your_user_name
password:your_password

Of course, you will need permissions to upload to PyPI, for this to work.