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.

• Builds manylinux, 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.}

cibuildwheel is not intended to run on your development machine. Because it uses system Python from Python.org on macOS and Windows, 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. For Linux builds, it uses manylinux docker images, so those can be done locally for testing in a pinch.

To build manylinux, 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@v2

      # Used to host cibuildwheel
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v2

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.1.2

      - 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@v2
        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.

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.
Matplotlib			The venerable Matplotlib, a Python library with C++ portions
MyPy			MyPyC, the compiled component of MyPy.
psutil			Cross-platform lib for process and system monitoring in Python
scikit-image			Image processing library. Uses cibuildwheel to build and test a project that uses Cython with platform-native code.
twisted-iocpsupport			A submodule of Twisted that hooks into native C APIs using Cython.
cmake			Multitagged binary builds for all supported platforms, using cibw 2 config configuration.
websockets			Library for building WebSocket servers and clients. Mostly written in Python, with a small C 'speedups' extension module.
pyzmq			Python bindings for zeromq, the networking library. Uses Cython and CFFI.
aiortc			WebRTC and ORTC implementation for Python using asyncio.

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

14 September 2021

• 🛠 Updated CPython 3.10 to 3.10.0rc2
• 📚 Multiple docs updates
• 🐛 Improved warnings when built binaries are bundled into the container on Linux. (#807)

7 August 2021

• ✨ Corresponding with the release of CPython 3.10.0rc1, which is ABI stable, cibuildwheel now builds CPython 3.10 by default - without the CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS flag.

^{Note: v2.1.0 was a bad release, it was yanked from PyPI.}

25 July 2021

• 📚 Docs improvements (#767)
• 🛠 Dependency updates, including delocate 0.9.0.

16 July 2021

• 🌟 You can now configure cibuildwheel options inside your project's pyproject.toml! Environment variables still work of course. Check out the documentation for more info.
• 🌟 Added support for building wheels with build, as well as pip. This feature is controlled with the CIBW_BUILD_FRONTEND option.
• 🌟 Added the ability to test building wheels on CPython 3.10! Because CPython 3.10 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. (#675) This version of cibuildwheel includes CPython 3.10.0b4.
• ⚠️ Removed support for building Python 2.7 and Python 3.5 wheels, for both CPython and PyPy. If you still need to build on these versions, please use the latest v1.x version. (#596)
• ✨ Added the ability to build CPython 3.8 wheels for Apple Silicon. (#704)
• 🛠 Update to the latest build dependencies, including Auditwheel 4. (#633)
• 🛠 Use the unified pypa/manylinux images to build PyPy (#671)
• 🐛 Numerous bug fixes & docs improvements

22 June 2021

• ✨ Adds support building macOS universal2/arm64 wheels on Python 3.8.

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 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!
• @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

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.

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.