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.

^{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.
⁴ CPython 3.11 is available using the CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS option.}

• 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.

cibuildwheel runs inside a CI service. Supported platforms depend on which service you're using:

^{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.}

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-10.15]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

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

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.8.0

      - 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.

The following diagram summarises the steps that cibuildwheel takes on each platform.

^{Explore an interactive version of this diagram in the docs.}

These options can be specified in a pyproject.toml file, as well; see configuration.

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.

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.

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.

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)

7 June 2022

• 🛠 Update the prerelease CPython 3.11 to 3.11.0b3

25 May 2022

• 🌟 Added the ability to test building wheels on CPython 3.11! Because CPython 3.11 is in beta, these wheels should not be distributed, because they might not be compatible with the final release, but it's available to build for testing purposes. Use the flag --prerelease-pythons or CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS to test. This version of cibuildwheel includes CPython 3.11.0b1. (#1109)
• 📚 Added an interactive diagram showing how cibuildwheel works to the docs (#1100)

29 April 2022

• ✨ Added support for building ABI3 wheels. cibuildwheel will now recognise when an ABI3 wheel was produced, and skip subsequent build steps where the previously built wheel is compatible. Tests still will run on all selected versions of Python, using the ABI3 wheel. Check this entry in the docs for more info. (#1091)
• ✨ You can now build wheels directly from sdist archives, in addition to source directories. Just call cibuildwheel with an sdist argument on the command line, like cibuildwheel mypackage-1.0.0.tar.gz. For more details, check the --help output (#1096)
• 🐛 Fix a bug where cibuildwheel would crash when no builds are selected and --allow-empty is passed (#1086)
• 🐛 Workaround a permissions issue on Linux relating to newer versions of git and setuptools_scm (#1095)
• 📚 Minor docs improvements

That's the last few versions.

ℹ️ Want more changelog? Head over to the changelog page in the docs.

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.

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

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

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.