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 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?

^{¹ PyPy is only supported for manylinux wheels.
² Windows arm64 support is experimental.}

• 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:

^{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@v3

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.17.0

      - 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

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			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.
Tornado			Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Uses stable ABI for a small C extension.
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
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
duckdb			DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP Database Management System

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

v2.17.0

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)

v2.16.4

28 January 2024

• 🛠 Update manylinux pins to upgrade from a problematic PyPy version. (#1737)

v2.16.3

26 January 2024

• 🐛 Fix a bug when building from sdist, where relative paths to files in the package didn't work because the working directory was wrong (#1687)
• 🛠 Adds the ability to disable mounting the host filesystem in containers to /host, through the disable_host_mount suboption on CIBW_CONTAINER_ENGINE.
• 📚 A lot of docs improvements! (#1708, #1705, #1686, #1679, #1667, #1665)

v2.16.2

3 October 2023

• 🛠 Updates CPython 3.12 version to 3.12.0, final release (#1635)
• ✨ Adds a debug option CIBW_DEBUG_KEEP_CONTAINER to stop cibuildwheel deleting build containers after the build finishes. (#1620)
• 📚 Adds support for [tool.cibuildwheel] checking by adding a schema compatible with the validate-pyproject tool (#1622, #1628, #1629)
• 🐛 Fix parsing of CIBW_CONTAINER_ENGINE and CIBW_BUILD_FRONTEND options to not break arguments on : characters (#1621)
• 🐛 Fix the evaluation order of CIBW_ENVIRONMENT and CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_PASS so that CIBW_ENVIRONMENT assignments can reference environment variables passed through from the host machine. (#1617)
• 🛠 Supports manylinux images' deferred installation of interpreters through the manylinux-interpreters tool (#1630)

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

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

Credits

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

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.