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Build Python wheels on CI with minimal configuration.

Project description

cibuildwheel

PyPI Documentation Status Actions Status Travis Status Appveyor status CircleCI Status Azure Status

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 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
Pyodide
CPython 3.6 N/A N/A N/A
CPython 3.7 N/A N/A N/A
CPython 3.8 N/A N/A
CPython 3.9 ✅² N/A
CPython 3.10 ✅² N/A
CPython 3.11 ✅² N/A
CPython 3.12 ✅² ✅⁴
CPython 3.13³ ✅² N/A
PyPy 3.7 v7.3 N/A N/A N/A ✅¹ ✅¹ ✅¹ N/A N/A N/A
PyPy 3.8 v7.3 N/A N/A ✅¹ ✅¹ ✅¹ N/A N/A N/A
PyPy 3.9 v7.3 N/A N/A ✅¹ ✅¹ ✅¹ N/A N/A N/A
PyPy 3.10 v7.3 N/A N/A ✅¹ ✅¹ ✅¹ N/A N/A N/A

¹ PyPy is only supported for manylinux wheels.
² Windows arm64 support is experimental.
³ CPython 3.13 is available using the CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS option. Free-threaded mode requires opt-in, not yet available on macOS.
⁴ Experimental, not yet supported on PyPI, but can be used directly in web deployment. Use --platform pyodide to build.

  • 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
Azure Pipelines ✅²
Travis CI
AppVeyor ✅²
CircleCI
Gitlab CI ✅¹
Cirrus 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.
² 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-latest, windows-latest, macos-13, macos-14]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      # Used to host cibuildwheel
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.19.0

      - 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@v4
        with:
          name: cibw-wheels-${{ matrix.os }}-${{ strategy.job-index }}
          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 github icon windows icon apple icon linux icon 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.
pytorch-fairseq github icon apple icon linux icon Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
NumPy github icon travisci icon windows icon apple icon linux icon The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
Tornado github icon linux icon apple icon windows icon Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Uses stable ABI for a small C extension.
Matplotlib github icon windows icon apple icon linux icon The venerable Matplotlib, a Python library with C++ portions
NCNN github icon windows icon apple icon linux icon ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference framework optimized for the mobile platform
duckdb github icon apple icon linux icon windows icon DuckDB is an analytical in-process SQL database management system
Prophet github icon windows icon apple icon linux icon Tool for producing high quality forecasts for time series data that has multiple seasonality with linear or non-linear growth.
MyPy github icon apple icon linux icon windows icon The compiled version of MyPy using MyPyC.
Kivy github icon windows icon apple icon linux icon Open source UI framework written in Python, running on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS

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

v2.19.0

  • 🌟 Add Pyodide platform. Set with --platform pyodide or CIBW_PLATFORM: pyodide on Linux with a host Python 3.12 to build WebAssembly wheels. Not accepted on PyPI currently, but usable directly in a website using Pyodide, for live docs, etc. (#1456, #1859)
  • 🌟 Add build[uv] backend, which will take a pre-existing uv install (or install cibuildwheel[uv]) and use uv for all environment setup and installs on Python 3.8+. This is significantly faster in most cases. (#1856)
  • ✨ Add free-threaded macOS builds and update CPython to 3.13.0b2. (#1854)
  • 🐛 Issue copying a wheel to a non-existent output dir fixed. (#1851, #1862)
  • 🐛 Better determinism for the test environment seeding. (#1835)
  • 🛠 VIRTUAL_ENV variable now set. (#1842)
  • 🛠 Remove a pip<21.3 workaround. (#1842)
  • 🛠 Error handling was refactored to use exceptions. (#1719)
  • 🛠 Hardcoded paths in tests avoided. (#1834)
  • 🛠 Single Python tests made more generic. (#1835)
  • 🛠 Sped up our ci by splitting up emulation tests. (#1839)

v2.18.1

  • 🌟 Add free-threaded Linux and Windows builds for 3.13. New identifiers cp313t-*, new option CIBW_FREE_THREADED_SUPPORT/tool.cibuildwheel.free-threaded-support required to opt-in. See the docs for more information. (#1831)
  • ✨ The container-engine is now a build (non-global) option. (#1792)
  • 🛠 The build backend for cibuildwheel is now hatchling. (#1297)
  • 🛠 Significant improvements and modernization to our noxfile. (#1823)
  • 🛠 Use pylint's new GitHub Actions reporter instead of a custom matcher. (#1823)
  • 🛠 Unpin virtualenv updates for Python 3.7+ (#1830)
  • 🐛 Fix running linux tests from Windows or macOS ARM. (#1788)
  • 📚 Fix our documentation build. (#1821)

v2.18.0

12 May 2024

  • ✨ Adds CPython 3.13 support, under the prerelease flag CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS. This version of cibuildwheel uses 3.13.0b1. Free-threading mode is not available yet (#1657), waiting on official binaries (planned for beta 2) and pip support.

    While CPython is in beta, the ABI can change, so your wheels might not be compatible with the final release. For this reason, we don't recommend distributing wheels until RC1, at which point 3.13 will be available in cibuildwheel without the flag. (#1815)

  • ✨ Musllinux now defaults to musllinux_1_2. You can set the older musllinux_1_1 via config if needed. (#1817)

  • 🛠 No longer pre-seed setuptools/wheel in virtual environments (#1819)

  • 🛠 Respect the constraints file when building with pip, matching build (#1818)

  • 🛠 Use uv to compile our pinned dependencies, 10x faster and doesn't require special setup (#1778)

  • 🐛 Fix an issue with the schema (#1788)

  • 📚 Document the new delocate error checking macOS versions (#1766)

  • 📚 Document Rust builds (#1816)

  • 📚 Speed up our readthedocs builds with uv, 26 seconds -> 6 seconds to install dependencies (#1816)

v2.17.0

11 March 2024

  • 🌟 Adds the ability to inherit configuration in TOML overrides. This makes certain configurations much simpler. If you're overriding an option like before-build or environment, and you just want to add an extra command or environment variable, you can just append (or prepend) to the previous config. See the docs for more information. (#1730)
  • 🌟 Adds official support for native arm64 macOS GitHub runners. To use them, just specify macos-14 as an os of your job in your workflow file. You can also keep macos-13 in your build matrix to build x86_64. Check out the new GitHub Actions example config.
  • ✨ You no longer need to specify --platform to run cibuildwheel locally! Instead it will detect your platform automatically. This was a safety feature, no longer necessary. (#1727)
  • 🛠 Removed setuptools and wheel pinned versions. This only affects old-style projects without a pyproject.toml, projects with pyproject.toml are already getting fresh versions of their build-system.requires installed into an isolated environment. (#1725)
  • 🛠 Improve how the GitHub Action passes arguments (#1757)
  • 🛠 Remove a system-wide install of pipx in the GitHub Action (#1745)
  • 🐛 No longer will cibuildwheel override the PIP_CONSTRAINT environment variable when using the build frontend. Instead it will be extended. (#1675)
  • 🐛 Fix a bug where building and testing both x86_86 and arm64 wheels on the same runner caused the wrong architectures in the test environment (#1750)
  • 🐛 Fix a bug that prevented testing a CPython 3.8 wheel targeting macOS 11+ on x86_64 (#1768)
  • 📚 Moved the docs onto the official PyPA domain - they're now available at https://cibuildwheel.pypa.io . (#1775)
  • 📚 Docs and examples improvements (#1762, #1734)

v2.16.5

30 January 2024

  • 🐛 Fix an incompatibility with the GitHub Action and new GitHub Runner images for Windows that bundle Powershell 7.3+ (#1741)
  • 🛠 Preliminary support for new macos-14 arm64 runners (#1743)

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

Credits

cibuildwheel stands on the shoulders of giants.

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

See also

Another very similar tool to consider is matthew-brett/multibuild. multibuild is a shell script toolbox for building a wheel on various platforms. It is used as a basis to build some of the big data science tools, like SciPy.

If you are building Rust wheels, you can get by without some of the tricks required to make GLIBC work via manylinux; this is especially relevant for cross-compiling, which is easy with Rust. See maturin-action for a tool that is optimized for building Rust wheels and cross-compiling.

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