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	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
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
PyPy 3.9 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.

Usage

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.}

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@v3

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

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.9.0

      - 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@v3
        with:
          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.
NumPy			The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
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
NCNN			ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference framework optimized for the mobile platform
Kivy			Open source UI framework written in Python, running on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS
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.
pydantic			Data parsing and validation using Python type hints

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

v2.9.0

11 August 2022

🌟 CPython 3.11 wheels are now built by default - without the CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS flag. It's time to build and upload these wheels to PyPI! This release includes CPython 3.11.0rc1, which is guaranteed to be ABI compatible with the final release. (#1226)
⚠️ Removed support for running cibuildwheel in Python 3.6. Python 3.6 is EOL. However, cibuildwheel continues to build CPython 3.6 wheels for the moment. (#1175)
✨ Improved error messages when misspelling TOML options, suggesting close matches (#1205)
🛠 When running on Apple Silicon (so far, an unsupported mode of operation), cibuildwheel no longer builds universal2 wheels by default - just arm64. See #1204 for discussion. We hope to release official support for native builds on Apple Silicon soon! (#1217)

v2.8.1

18 July 2022

🐛 Fix a bug when building CPython 3.8 wheels on an Apple Silicon machine where testing would always fail. cibuildwheel will no longer attempt to test the arm64 part of CPython 3.8 wheels because we use the x86_64 installer of CPython 3.8 due to its macOS system version backward-compatibility. See #1169 for more details. (#1171)
🛠 Update the prerelease CPython 3.11 to 3.11.0b4. (#1180)
🛠 The GitHub Action will ensure a compatible version of Python is installed on the runner (#1114)
📚 A few docs improvements

v2.8.0

5 July 2022

✨ You can now run cibuildwheel on Podman, as an alternate container engine to Docker (which remains the default). This is useful in environments where a Docker daemon isn't available, for example, it can be run inside a Docker container, or without root access. To use Podman, set the CIBW_CONTAINER_ENGINE option. (#966)
✨ Adds support for building py3-none-{platform} wheels. This works the same as ABI3 - wheels won't be rebuilt, but tests will still be run across all selected versions of Python.

These wheels contain native extension code, but don't use the Python APIs. Typically, they're bridged to Python using a FFI module like ctypes or cffi. Because they don't use Python ABI, the wheels are more compatible - they work across many Python versions.

Check out this example ctypes project to see an example of how it works. (#1151)
🛠 cibuildwheel will now error if multiple builds in a single run produce the same wheel filename, as this indicates a misconfiguration. (#1152)
📚 A few docs improvements and updates to keep things up-to-date.

v2.7.0

17 June 2022

🌟 Added support for the new manylinux_2_28 images. These new images are based on AlmaLinux, the community-driven successor to CentOS, unlike manylinux_2_24, which was based on Debian. To build on these images, set your CIBW_MANYLINUX_*_IMAGE option to manylinux_2_28. (#1026)
🐛 Fix a bug where tests were not being run on CPython 3.11 (when CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS was set) (#1138)
✨ You can now build Linux wheels on Windows, as long as you have Docker installed and set to 'Linux containers' (#1117)
🐛 Fix a bug on macOS that caused cibuildwheel to crash trying to overwrite a previously-built wheel of the same name. (#1129)

v2.6.1

7 June 2022

🛠 Update the prerelease CPython 3.11 to 3.11.0b3

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

godlygeek/cibuildwheel