cibuildwheel

Documentation

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 Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, GitHub Actions and CircleCI - and it builds and tests your wheels across all of your platforms.

What does it do?

^{¹ Not supported on Travis
² Only supported on Travis
³ Beta support until Travis CI fixes a bug}

• Builds manylinux, macOS and Windows wheels for CPython and PyPy using Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, and CircleCI
• Bundles shared library dependencies on Linux and macOS through auditwheel and delocate
• Runs the library test suite against the wheel-installed version of your library

Usage

cibuildwheel currently works on Travis CI, Azure Pipelines, AppVeyor, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, and Gitlab CI. Check the table below for supported platforms on each service:

^{¹ Requires a "third-party build host"; expected to work with cibuildwheel but not directly tested by our CI.}

cibuildwheel is not intended to run on your development machine. Because it uses system Python from Python.org it will try to install packages globally - not what you expect from a build tool! Instead, isolated CI services like those mentioned above are ideal.

Example setup

To build manylinux, macOS, and Windows wheels on Travis CI and upload them to PyPI whenever you tag a version, you could use this .travis.yml:

language: python

jobs:
  include:
    # perform a linux build
    - services: docker
    # and a mac build
    - os: osx
      language: shell
    # and a windows build
    - os: windows
      language: shell
      before_install:
        - choco install python --version 3.8.0
        - export PATH="/c/Python38:/c/Python38/Scripts:$PATH"
        # make sure it's on PATH as 'python3'
        - ln -s /c/Python38/python.exe /c/Python38/python3.exe

env:
  global:
    - TWINE_USERNAME=__token__
    # Note: TWINE_PASSWORD is set to a PyPI API token in Travis settings

install:
  - python3 -m pip install cibuildwheel==1.7.1

script:
  # build the wheels, put them into './wheelhouse'
  - python3 -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse

after_success:
  # if the release was tagged, upload them to PyPI
  - |
    if [[ $TRAVIS_TAG ]]; then
      python3 -m pip install twine
      python3 -m twine upload wheelhouse/*.whl
    fi

For more information, including how to build on GitHub Actions, Appveyor, Azure Pipelines, or CircleCI, check out the documentation and the examples.

Options

Working examples

Here are some repos that use cibuildwheel.

• Matplotlib - The venerable Matplotlib, a Python library with C++ portions, built for Linux, Mac, and Windows on Github Actions.
• pyinstrument_cext - A simple C extension, without external dependencies, built on Travis CI/Appveyor.
• websockets
• Parselmouth - A Python interface to the Praat software package, using pybind11, C++17 and CMake, with the core Praat static library built only once and shared between wheels; all platforms built on Github Actions.
• python-admesh
• pybase64
• KDEpy
• AutoPy
• apriltags2-ethz
• TgCrypto
• twisted-iocpsupport - A submodule of Twisted that hooks into native C APIs using Cython. Built on Github CI for Windows.
• gmic-py
• creme
• PyAV
• aiortc
• aioquic
• pikepdf
• fathon
• etebase-py - Python bindings to a Rust library using setuptools-rust, and sccache for improved speed, built on Travis CI.
• xmlstarlet - Python 3.6+ CFFI bindings with true MSVC build and GitHub Actions.
• bx-python - A library that includes Cython extensions, built on Travis CI for Mac and Linux.
• coverage.py - The coverage tool for Python.

Add your repo here! Send a PR.

^{I'd like to include notes here to indicate why an example might be interesting to cibuildwheel users - the styles/technologies/techniques used in each. Please include that in future additions!}

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 licence implications. Check the license for any code you're pulling in to make sure that's allowed.

Changelog

1.7.1

3 December 2020

• 🛠 Update manylinux2010 image to resolve issues with 'yum' repositories (#472)

1.7.0

26 November 2020

• ✨ New logging format, that uses 'fold groups' in CI services that support it. (#458)
• 🛠 Update PyPy to 7.3.3 (#460)
• 🐛 Fix a bug where CIBW_BEFORE_ALL runs with a very old version of Python on Linux. (#464)

1.6.4

31 October 2020

• 🐛 Fix crash on Appveyor during nuget install due to old system CA certificates. We now use certifi's CA certs to download files. (#455)

1.6.3

12 October 2020

• 🐛 Fix missing SSL certificates on macOS (#447)
• 🛠 Update OpenSSL Python 3.5 patch to 1.1.1h on macOS (#449)

1.6.2

9 October 2020

• ✨ Python 3.9 updated to the final release version - v3.9.0 (#440)
• 🛠 Pypy updated to v7.3.2, adding alpha support for Python 3.7 (#430)

1.6.1

20 September 2020

• 🛠 Add PPC64LE manylinux image supporting Python 3.9. (#436)
• 📚 Add project URLs to PyPI listing (#428)

1.6.0

9 September 2020

• 🌟 Add Python 3.9 support! This initial support uses release candidate builds. You can start publishing wheels for Python 3.9 now, ahead of the official release. (#382)

  Minor note - if you're building PPC64LE wheels, the manylinux image pinned by this version is still on Python 3.9b3, not a release candidate. We'd advise holding off on distributing 3.9 ppc64le wheels until a subsequent version of cibuildwheel.

• 🌟 Add Gitlab CI support. Gitlab CI can now build Linux wheels, using cibuildwheel. (#419)

• 🐛 Fix a bug that causes pyproject.toml dependencies to fail to install on Windows (#420)

• 📚 Added some information about Windows VC++ runtimes and how they relate to wheels.

1.5.5

22 July 2020

• 🐛 Fix a bug that would cause command substitutions in CIBW_ENVIRONMENT to produce no output on Linux (#411)
• 🐛 Fix regression (introduced in 1.5.3) which caused BEFORE_BUILD and BEFORE_ALL to be executed in the wrong directory (#410)

1.5.4

19 June 2020

• 🐛 Fix a bug that would cause command substitutions in CIBW_ENVIRONMENT variables to not interpret quotes in commands correctly (#406, #408)

1.5.3

19 July 2020

• 🛠 Update CPython 3.8 to 3.8.3 (#405)
• 🛠 Internal refactoring of Linux build, to move control flow into Python (#386)

1.5.2

8 July 2020

• 🐛 Fix an issue on Windows where pyproject.toml would cause an error when some requirements formats were used. (#401)
• 🛠 Update CPython 3.7 to 3.7.8 (#394)

1.5.1

25 June 2020

• 🐛 Fix "OSError: [WinError 17] The system cannot move the file to a different disk drive" on Github Actions (#388, #389)

1.5.0

24 June 2020

• 🌟 Add CIBW_BEFORE_ALL option, which lets you run a command on the build machine before any wheels are built. This is especially useful when building on Linux, to make something external to Python, or to yum install a dependency. (#342)
• ✨ Added support for projects using pyproject.toml instead of setup.py (#360, #358)
• ✨ Added workaround to allow Python 3.5 on Windows to pull dependencies from pyproject.toml. (#358)
• 📚 Improved Github Actions examples and docs (#354, #362)
• 🐛 Ensure pip wheel uses the specified package, and doesn't build a wheel from PyPI (#369)
• 🛠 Internal changes: using pathlib.Path, precommit hooks, testing improvements.

1.4.2

25 May 2020

• 🛠 Dependency updates, including CPython 3.8.3 & manylinux images.
• 🛠 Lots of internal updates - type annotations and checking using mypy, and a new integration testing system.
• ⚠️ Removed support for running cibuildwheel using Python 3.5. cibuildwheel will continue to build Python 3.5 wheels until EOL.

1.4.1

4 May 2020

• 🐛 Fix a bug causing programs running inside the i686 manylinux images to think they were running x86_64 and target the wrong architecture. (#336, #338)

1.4.0

2 May 2020

• 🌟 Deterministic builds. cibuildwheel now locks the versions of the tools it uses. This means that pinning your version of cibuildwheel pins the versions of pip, setuptools, manylinux etc. that are used under the hood. This should make things more reliable. But note that we don't control the entire build environment on macOS and Windows, where the version of Xcode and Visual Studio can still effect things.

  This can be controlled using the CIBW_DEPENDENCY_VERSIONS and manylinux image options - if you always want to use the latest toolchain, you can still do that, or you can specify your own pip constraints file and manylinux image. (#256)

• ✨ Added package_dir command line option, meaning we now support building a package that lives in a subdirectory and pulls in files from the wider project. See the package_dir option help for more information.

  Note that this change makes the working directory (where you call cibuildwheel from) relevant on Linux, as it's considered the 'project' and will be copied into the Docker container. If your builds are slower on this version, that's likely the reason. cd to your project and then call cibuildwheel from there. (#319, #295)

• 🛠 On macOS, we make MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET default to 10.9 if it's not set. This should make things more consistent between Python versions.

• 🛠 Dependency updates - CPython 3.7.7, CPython 2.7.18, Pypy 7.3.1.

1.3.0

12 March 2020

• 🌟 Add support for building on Github Actions! Check out the docs for information on how to set it up. (#194)
• ✨ Add the CIBW_BEFORE_TEST option, which lets you run a command to prepare the environment before your tests are run. (#242)

1.2.0

8 March 2020

• 🌟 Add support for building PyPy wheels, across Manylinux, macOS, and Windows. (#185)
• 🌟 Added the ability to build ARM64 (aarch64), ppc64le, and s390x wheels, using manylinux2014 and Travis CI. (#273)
• ✨ You can now build macOS wheels on Appveyor. (#230)
• 🛠 Changed default macOS minimum target to 10.9, from 10.6. This allows the use of more modern C++ libraries, among other things. (#156)
• 🛠 Stop building universal binaries on macOS. We now only build x86_64 wheels on macOS. (#220)
• ✨ Allow chaining of commands using && and || on Windows inside CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD and CIBW_TEST_COMMAND. (#293)
• 🛠 Improved error reporting for failed Cython builds due to stale .so files (#263)
• 🛠 Update CPython from 3.7.5 to 3.7.6 and from 3.8.0 to 3.8.2 on Mac/Windows
• 🛠 Improved error messages when a bad config breaks cibuildwheel's PATH variable. (#264)
• ⚠️ Removed support for running cibuildwheel on Python 2.7. cibuildwheel will continue to build Python 2.7 wheels for a little while. (#265)

1.1.0

7 December 2019

• 🌟 Add support for building manylinux2014 wheels. To use, set CIBW_MANYLINUX_X86_64_IMAGE and CIBW_MANYLINUX_I686_IMAGE to manylinux2014.
• ✨ Add support for Linux on Appveyor (#204, #207)
• ✨ Add CIBW_REPAIR_WHEEL_COMMAND env variable, for changing how auditwheel or delocate are invoked, or testing an equivalent on Windows. (#211)
• 📚 Added some travis example configs - these are available in /examples. (#228)

1.0.0

10 November 2019

• 🌟 Add support for building Python 3.8 wheels! (#180)
• 🌟 Add support for building manylinux2010 wheels. cibuildwheel will now build using the manylinux2010 images by default. If your project is still manylinux1 compatible, you should get both manylinux1 and manylinux2010 wheels - you can upload both to PyPI. If you always require manylinux1 wheels, you can build using the old manylinux1 image using the manylinux image option. (#155)
• 📚 Documentation is now on its own mini-site, rather than on the README (#169)
• ✨ Add support for building Windows wheels on Travis CI. (#160)
• 🛠 If you set CIBW_TEST_COMMAND, your tests now run in a virtualenv. (#164)
• 🛠 Windows now uses Python as installed by nuget, rather than the versions installed by the various CI providers. (#180)
• 🛠 Update Python from 2.7.16 to 2.7.17 and 3.7.4 to 3.7.5 on macOS (#171)
• ⚠️ Removed support for Python 3.4 (#168)

0.12.0

29 September 2019

• ✨ Add CIBW_TEST_EXTRAS option, to allow testing using extra_require options. For example, set CIBW_TEST_EXTRAS=test,qt to make the wheel installed with pip install <wheel_file>[test,qt]
• 🛠 Update Python from 3.7.2 to 3.7.4 on macOS
• 🛠 Update OpenSSL patch to 1.0.2t on macOS

0.11.1

28 May 2019

• 🐛 Fix missing file in the release tarball, that was causing problems with Windows builds (#141)

0.11.0

26 May 2019

• 🌟 Add support for building on Azure pipelines! This lets you build all Linux, Mac and Windows wheels on one service, so it promises to be the easiest to set up! Check out the quickstart in the docs, or cibuildwheel-azure-example for an example project. (#126, #132)
• 🛠 Internal change - the end-to-end test projects format was updated, so we can more precisely assert what should be produced for each one. (#136, #137).

0.10.2

10 March 2019

• 🛠 Revert temporary fix in macOS, that was working around a bug in pip 19 (#129)
• 🛠 Update Python to 2.7.16 on macOS
• 🛠 Update OpenSSL patch to 1.0.2r on macOS

0.10.1

3 February 2019

• 🐛 Fix build stalling on macOS (that was introduced in pip 19) (#122)
• 🐛 Fix "AttributeError: 'Popen' object has no attribute 'args'" on Python 2.7 for Linux builds (#108)
• 🛠 Update Python from 3.6.7, 3.7.1 to 3.6.8, 3.7.2 on macOS
• 🛠 Update openssl patch from 1.0.2p to 1.0.2q on macOS
• 🛠 Sorting build options dict items when printing preamble (#114)

0.10.0

23 September 2018

• 🌟 Add CIBW_BUILD option, for specifying which specific builds to perform (#101)
• 🌟 Add support for building Mac and Linux on CircleCI (#91, #97)
• 🛠 Improved support for building universal wheels (#95)
• 🛠 Ensure log output is unbuffered and therefore in the correct order (#92)
• 🛠 Improved error reporting for errors that occur inside a package's setup.py (#88)
• ⚠️ Removed support for Python 3.3 on Windows.

0.9.4

29 July 2018

• 🛠 CIBW_TEST_COMMAND now runs in a shell on Mac (as well as Linux) (#81)

0.9.3

10 July 2018

• 🛠 Update to Python 3.6.6 on macOS (#82)
• ✨ Add support for building Python 3.7 wheels on Windows (#76)
• ⚠️ Deprecated support for Python 3.3 on Windows.

0.9.2

1 July 2018

• 🛠 Update Python 3.7.0rc1 to 3.7.0 on macOS (#79)

0.9.1

18 June 2018

• 🛠 Removed the need to use {python} and {pip} in CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD statements, by ensuring the correct version is always on the path at python and pip instead. (#60)
• 🛠 We now patch the _ssl module on Python 3.4 and 3.5 so these versions can still make SSL web requests using TLS 1.2 while building. (#71)

0.9.0

18 June 2018

• ✨ Add support for Python 3.7 (#73)

0.8.0

4 May 2018

• ⚠️ Drop support for Python 3.3 on Linux (#67)
• 🐛 Fix TLS by updating setuptools (#69)

0.7.1

2 April 2017

• 🐛 macOS: Fix Pip bugs resulting from PyPI TLS 1.2 enforcement
• 🐛 macOS: Fix brew Python3 version problems in the CI

0.7.0

7 January 2018

• ✨ You can now specify a custom docker image using the CIBW_MANYLINUX1_X86_64_IMAGE and CIBW_MANYLINUX1_I686_IMAGE options. (#46)
• 🐛 Fixed a bug where cibuildwheel would download and build a package from PyPI(!) instead of building the package on the local machine. (#51)

0.6.0

9 October 2017

• ✨ On the Linux build, the host filesystem is now accessible via /host (#36)
• 🐛 Fixed a bug where setup.py scripts would run the wrong version of Python when running subprocesses on Linux (#35)

0.5.1

10 September 2017

• 🐛 Fixed a couple of bugs on Python 3.
• ✨ Added experimental support for Mac builds on Bitrise.io

0.5.0

7 September 2017

• ✨ CIBW_ENVIRONMENT added. You can now set environment variables for each build, even within the Docker container on Linux. This is a big one! (#21)
• ✨ CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD now runs in a system shell on all platforms. You can now do things like CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD="cmd1 && cmd2". (#32)

0.4.1

14 August 2017

• 🐛 Fixed a bug on Windows where subprocess' output was hidden (#23)
• 🐛 Fixed a bug on AppVeyor where logs would appear in the wrong order due to output buffering (#24, thanks @YannickJadoul!)

0.4.0

23 July 2017

• 🐛 Fixed a bug that was increasing the build time by building the wheel twice. This was a problem for large projects that have a long build time. If you're upgrading and you need the old behaviour, use CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD={pip} install ., or install exactly the dependencies you need in CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD. See #18.

0.3.0

27 June 2017

• ⚠️ Removed Python 2.6 support on Linux (#12)

0.2.1

11 June 2017

• 🛠 Changed the build process to install the package before building the wheel - this allows direct dependencies to be installed first (#9, thanks @tgarc!)
• ✨ Added Python 3 support for the main process, for systems where Python 3 is the default (#8, thanks @tgarc).

0.2.0

13 April 2017

• ✨ Added CIBW_SKIP option, letting users explicitly skip a build
• ✨ Added CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD option, letting users run a shell command before the build starts

0.1.3

31 March 2017

• 🌟 First public release!

Contributing

For more info on how to contribute to cibuildwheel, see the docs.

Maintainers

• Joe Rickerby @joerick
• Yannick Jadoul @YannickJadoul
• Matthieu Darbois @mayeut
• Henry Schreiner @henryiii

Credits

cibuildwheel stands on the shoulders of giants.

• ⭐️ @matthew-brett for matthew-brett/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!

See also

If you'd like to keep wheel building separate from the package itself, check out astrofrog/autowheel. It builds packages using cibuildwheel from source distributions on PyPI.

If cibuildwheel is too limited for your needs, consider matthew-brett/multibuild. multibuild is a toolbox for building a wheel on various platforms. It can do a lot more than this project - it's used to build SciPy!