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.
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 built by default using Python RCs, starting with cibuildwheel 2.20. Free-threaded mode will still require opt-in using CIBW_FREE_THREADED_SUPPORT
.
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.
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.
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: ${{ matrix.os }}
strategy:
matrix:
os: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-13, macos-14]
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4
# Used to host cibuildwheel
- uses: actions/setup-python@v5
- name: Install cibuildwheel
run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.20.0
- name: Build wheels
run: python -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse
# to supply options, put them in 'env', like:
# env:
# CIBW_SOME_OPTION: value
- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
with:
name: cibw-wheels-${{ 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.
The following diagram summarises the steps that cibuildwheel takes on each platform.
Explore an interactive version of this diagram in the docs.
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.
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. | ||
pytorch-fairseq | Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python. | ||
NumPy | The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python. | ||
duckdb | DuckDB is an analytical in-process SQL database management system | ||
Tornado | Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Uses stable ABI for a small C extension. | ||
NCNN | ncnn is a high-performance neural network inference framework optimized for the mobile platform | ||
Matplotlib | The venerable Matplotlib, a Python library with C++ portions | ||
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. | ||
Kivy | 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.
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.
- 🌟 CPython 3.13 wheels are now built by default - without the
CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS
flag. It's time to build and upload these wheels to PyPI! This release includes CPython 3.13.0rc1, which is guaranteed to be ABI compatible with the final release. Free-threading is still behind a flag/config option. (#1950) - ✨ Provide a
CIBW_ALLOW_EMPTY
environment variable as an alternative to the command line flag. (#1937) - 🐛 Don't use uv on PyPy3.8 on Windows, it stopped working starting in 0.2.25. Note that PyPy 3.8 is EoL. (#1868)
- 🛠 Set the
VSCMD_ARG_TGT_ARCH
variable based on target arch. (#1876) - 🛠 Undo cleaner output on pytest 8-8.2 now that 8.3 is out. (#1943)
- 📚 Update examples to use Python 3.12 on host (cibuildwheel will require Python 3.11+ on the host machine starting in October 2024) (#1919)
- 🐛 Update manylinux2014 pins to versions that support past-EoL CentOS 7 mirrors. (#1917)
- 🐛 Support
--no-isolation
withbuild[uv]
build-frontend. (#1889) - 🛠 Provide attestations for releases at https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel/attestations. (#1916)
- 🛠 Provide CPython 3.13.0b3. (#1913)
- 🛠 Remove some workarounds now that pip 21.1 is available. (#1891, #1892)
- 📚 Remove nosetest from our docs. (#1821)
- 📚 Document the macOS ARM workaround for 3.8 on GHA. (#1871)
- 📚 GitLab CI + macOS is now a supported platform with an example. (#1911)
- 🐛 Don't require setup-python on GHA for Pyodide (#1868)
- 🐛 Specify full python path for uv (fixes issue in 0.2.10 & 0.2.11) (#1881)
- 🛠 Update for pip 24.1b2 on CPython 3.13. (#1879)
- 🛠 Fix a warning in our schema generation script. (#1866)
- 🛠 Cleaner output on pytest 8-8.2. (#1865)
See the release post for more info on new features!
- 🌟 Add Pyodide platform. Set with
--platform pyodide
orCIBW_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 installcibuildwheel[uv]
) and useuv
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)
- 🌟 Add free-threaded Linux and Windows builds for 3.13. New identifiers
cp313t-*
, new optionCIBW_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)
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
- Grzegorz Bokota @Czaki
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.