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, 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@v3

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

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.11.3

      - 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

v2.11.3

5 Dec 2022

✨ Improves the 'build options' log output that's printed at the start of each run (#1352)
✨ Added a friendly error message to a common misconfiguration of the CIBW_TEST_COMMAND option - not specifying path using the {project} placeholder (#1336)
🛠 The GitHub Action now uses Powershell on Windows to avoid occasional incompabilities with bash (#1346)

v2.11.2

26 October 2022

🛠 Updates CPython 3.11 to 3.11.0 - final release (#1327)
🛠 Simplify the default macOS repair command (#1322)
🛠 Fix the default MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET on arm64 (#1312)
🛠 Hide irrelevant pip warnings on linux (#1311)
🐛 Fix a bug that caused the stdout and stderr of commands in containers to be in the wrong order Previously, stdout could appear after stderr. (#1324)
📚 Added a FAQ entry describing how to perform native builds of CPython 3.8 wheels on Apple Silicon. (#1323)
📚 Other docs improvements

v2.11.1

13 October 2022

🛠 Updates to the latest manylinux images, and updates CPython 3.10 to 3.10.8.

v2.11.0

13 October 2022

🌟 Adds support for cross-compiling Windows ARM64 wheels. To use this feature, add ARM64 to the CIBW_ARCHS option on a Windows Intel runner. (#1144)
✨ Adds support for building Linux aarch64 wheels on Circle CI. (#1307)
✨ Adds support for building Windows wheels on Gitlab CI. (#1295)
✨ Adds support for building Linux aarch64 wheels under emulation on Gitlab CI. (#1295)
✨ Adds the ability to test cp38-macosx_arm64 wheels on a native arm64 runner. To do this, you'll need to preinstall the (experimental) universal2 version of CPython 3.8 on your arm64 runner before invoking cibuildwheel. Note: it is not recommended to build x86_64 wheels with this setup, your wheels will have limited compatibility wrt macOS versions. (#1283)
🛠 Improved error messages when using custom Docker images and Python cannot be found at the correct path. (#1298)
📚 Sample configs for Azure Pipelines and Travis CI updated (#1296)
📚 Other docs improvements - including more information about using Homebrew for build dependencies (#1290)

v2.10.2

25 September 2022

🐛 Fix a bug that caused win32 identifiers to fail when used with --only. (#1282)
🐛 Fix computation of auto/auto64/auto32 archs when targeting a different platform to the one that you're running cibuildwheel on. (#1266)
📚 Fix an mistake in the 'how it works' diagram. (#1274)

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

xunonxyz/cibuildwheel