`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.
<sup>³ Alpine 3.14 and very briefly 3.15's default python3 [was not able to load](https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel/issues/934) musllinux wheels. This has been fixed; please upgrade the python package if using Alpine from before the fix.</sup><br>
- Bundles shared library dependencies on Linux and macOS through [auditwheel](https://github.com/pypa/auditwheel) and [delocate](https://github.com/matthew-brett/delocate)
See the [cibuildwheel 1 documentation](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/1.x/) if you need to build unsupported versions of Python, such as Python 2.
<sup>¹ [Requires emulation](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/faq/#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.</sup><br>
`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.
For more information, including PyPI deployment, and the use of other CI services or the dedicated GitHub Action, check out the [documentation](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.org) and the [examples](https://github.com/pypa/cibuildwheel/tree/main/examples).
| | [`CIBW_PROJECT_REQUIRES_PYTHON`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#requires-python) | Manually set the Python compatibility of your project |
| | [`CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#prerelease-pythons) | Enable building with pre-release versions of Python if available |
| **Build customization** | [`CIBW_BUILD_FRONTEND`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#build-frontend) | Set the tool to use to build, either "pip" (default for now) or "build" |
| | [`CIBW_ENVIRONMENT`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#environment) | Set environment variables needed during the build |
| | [`CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_PASS_LINUX`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#environment-pass) | Set environment variables on the host to pass-through to the container during the build. |
| | [`CIBW_BEFORE_ALL`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#before-all) | Execute a shell command on the build system before any wheels are built. |
| | [`CIBW_REPAIR_WHEEL_COMMAND`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#repair-wheel-command) | Execute a shell command to repair each (non-pure Python) built wheel |
| | [`CIBW_DEPENDENCY_VERSIONS`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#dependency-versions) | Specify how cibuildwheel controls the versions of the tools it uses |
| **Testing** | [`CIBW_TEST_COMMAND`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#test-command) | Execute a shell command to test each built wheel |
These options can be specified in a pyproject.toml file, as well; see [configuration](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#configuration).
| [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. |
| [Tornado][] | ![travisci icon][] | ![apple icon][] ![linux icon][] | Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library, originally developed at FriendFeed. |
| [vaex][] | ![github icon][] | ![apple icon][] ![linux icon][] ![windows icon][] | Out-of-Core hybrid Apache Arrow/NumPy DataFrame for Python, ML, visualize and explore big tabular data at a billion rows per second 🚀 |
| [Google Benchmark][] | ![github icon][] | ![apple icon][] ![linux icon][] ![windows icon][] | A microbenchmark support library |
> ℹ️ That's just a handful, there are many more! Check out the [Working Examples](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/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.
- 📈 cibuildwheel now defaults to manylinux2014 image for linux builds, rather than manylinux2010. If you want to stick with manylinux2010, it's simple to set this using [the image options](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#linux-image). (#926)
- ✨ You can now pass environment variables from the host machine into the Docker container during a Linux build. Check out [the docs for `CIBW_ENVIRONMENT_PASS_LINUX `](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/options/#environment-pass) for the details. (#914)
- ✨ Added support for building PyPy 3.8 wheels. (#881)
- ✨ Added support for building Windows arm64 CPython wheels on a Windows arm64 runner. We can't test this in CI yet, so for now, this is experimental. (#920)
- 📚 Improved the deployment documentation (#911)
- 🛠 Changed the escaping behaviour inside cibuildwheel's option placeholders e.g. `{project}` in `before_build` or `{dest_dir}` in `repair_wheel_command`. This allows bash syntax like `${SOME_VAR}` to passthrough without being interpreted as a placeholder by cibuildwheel. See [this section](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#placeholders) in the docs for more info. (#889)
- 🛠 Pip updated to 21.3, meaning it now defaults to in-tree builds again. If this causes an issue with your project, setting environment variable `PIP_USE_DEPRECATED=out-of-tree-build` is available as a temporary flag to restore the old behaviour. However, be aware that this flag will probably be removed soon. (#881)
- 🐛 You can now access the current Python interpreter using `python3` within a build on Windows (#917)
- 🛠 Added a `config-file` option on the GitHub Action to specify something other than pyproject.toml in your GitHub Workflow file. (#883)
- 🐛 Fix missing resources in sdist and released wheel on PyPI. We've also made some internal changes to our release processes to make them more reliable. (#893, #894)
- 🌟 Added support for [musllinux](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0656/). Support for this new wheel format lets projects build wheels for Linux distributions that use [musl libc](https://musl.libc.org/), notably, [Alpine](https://alpinelinux.org/) Docker containers. (#768)
Musllinux builds are enabled by default. If you're not ready to build musllinux, add `*-musllinux_*` to your [`CIBW_SKIP`/`skip`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#build-skip) option. Or, you might have to make some changes to your options - to simplify that process, you can use...
- 🌟 TOML option overrides! This provides much greater flexibility in configuration via pyproject.toml. (#854)
You can now set build options for any subset of your builds using a match pattern. So, for example, you can customise CPython 3.8 builds with an override on `cp38-*` or musllinux builds by selecting `*musllinux*`. Check out [the docs](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/options/#overrides) for more info on the specifics.
- 🛠 Setting an empty string for the [`CIBW_*_IMAGE`](https://cibuildwheel.readthedocs.io/en/stable/options/#manylinux-image) option will now fallthrough to the config file or cibuildwheel's default, rather than causing an error. This makes the option easier to use in CI build matricies. (#829)
Everyone interacting with the cibuildwheel project via codebase, issue tracker, chat rooms, or otherwise is expected to follow the [PSF Code of Conduct](https://github.com/pypa/.github/blob/main/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md).
If you'd like to keep wheel building separate from the package itself, check out [astrofrog/autowheel](https://github.com/astrofrog/autowheel). It builds packages using cibuildwheel from source distributions on PyPI.
Another very similar tool to consider is [matthew-brett/multibuild](http://github.com/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.
