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, CircleCI, and GitLab CI - and it builds and tests your wheels across all of your platforms.

What does it do?

While cibuildwheel itself requires a recent Python version to run (we support the last three releases), it can target the following versions to build wheels:

	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	manylinux musllinux armv7l	Android	iOS	Pyodide
CPython 3.9	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	N/A	N/A	N/A
CPython 3.10	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	N/A	N/A	N/A
CPython 3.11	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	N/A	N/A	N/A
CPython 3.12	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	N/A	N/A	✅3
CPython 3.13	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	✅	✅	✅3
CPython 3.14	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	✅	✅	N/A
CPython 3.155	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅4	N/A	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.9 v7.3	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅1	✅1	✅1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.10 v7.3	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅1	✅1	✅1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.11 v7.3	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅1	✅1	✅1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
GraalPy 3.11 v24.2	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅1	N/A	✅1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
GraalPy 3.12 v25.0	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅1	N/A	✅1	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

^{1 PyPy & GraalPy are only supported for manylinux wheels.
2 Windows arm64 support is experimental.
3 Experimental, not yet supported on PyPI, but can be used directly in web deployment. Use --platform pyodide to build.
4 manylinux armv7l support is experimental. As there are no RHEL based image for this architecture, it's using an Ubuntu based image instead.
5 Python 3.15 requires opt-in using enable.}

• Builds manylinux, musllinux, macOS, and Windows wheels for CPython, PyPy, and GraalPy
• Works on GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, 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.

Usage

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

	Linux	macOS	Windows	Linux ARM	macOS ARM	Windows ARM	Android	iOS	Pyodide
GitHub Actions	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅2	✅4	✅3	✅
Azure Pipelines	✅	✅	✅		✅	✅2	✅4	✅3	✅5
CircleCI	✅	✅		✅	✅		✅45	✅35	✅5
GitLab CI	✅	✅	✅	✅1	✅		✅45	✅35	✅5

^{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.
3 Requires a macOS runner; runs tests on the simulator for the runner's architecture.
4 Building for Android requires the runner to be Linux x86_64, macOS ARM64 or macOS x86_64. Testing has additional requirements.
5 Builds may work, but are untested in cibuildwheel's CI.}

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, ubuntu-24.04-arm, windows-latest, windows-11-arm, macos-15-intel, macos-latest]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v6
        with:
          persist-credentials: false

      # Used to host cibuildwheel
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v6

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==3.4.1

      - 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@v6
        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.}

Warning

Building and testing wheels executes arbitrary code from your project and its dependencies. Although cibuildwheel uses OCI containers and Pyodide for some builds, these provide no security guarantees - the code you're building and testing has full access to the environment that's invoking cibuildwheel.

If you cannot trust all the code that's pulled in, maintain good security hygiene: keep the job that builds distributions separate from the job that uploads them to PyPI, handle secrets and credentials with care and rotate them regularly, and follow the principle of least privilege when granting permissions. Do not store sensitive data on CI runners.

	Option	Description
Build selection	platform	Override the auto-detected target platform
	build skip	Choose the Python versions to build
	archs	Change the architectures built on your machine by default.
	project-requires-python	Manually set the Python compatibility of your project
	enable	Enable building with extra categories of selectors present.
	allow-empty	Suppress the error code if no wheels match the specified build identifiers
Build customization	build-frontend	Set the tool to use to build, either "build" (default), "build[uv]", or "pip"
	config-settings	Specify config-settings for the build backend.
	environment	Set environment variables
	environment-pass	Set environment variables on the host to pass-through to the container.
	before-all	Execute a shell command on the build system before any wheels are built.
	before-build	Execute a shell command preparing each wheel's build
	xbuild-tools	Binaries on the path that should be included in an isolated cross-build environment.
	repair-wheel-command	Execute a shell command to repair each built wheel
	manylinux-*-image musllinux-*-image	Specify manylinux / musllinux container images
	container-engine	Specify the container engine to use when building Linux wheels
	dependency-versions	Control the versions of the tools cibuildwheel uses
	pyodide-version	Specify the Pyodide version to use for pyodide platform builds
Auditing	audit-requires	Install Python dependencies for the audit step
	audit-command	Use a tool to check wheels before the end of the run
Testing	test-command	The command to test each built wheel
	before-test	Execute a shell command before testing each wheel
	test-sources	Paths that are copied into the working directory of the tests
	test-requires	Install Python dependencies before running the tests
	test-extras	Install your wheel for testing using extras_require
	test-groups	Specify test dependencies from your project's dependency-groups
	test-skip	Skip running tests on some builds
	test-environment	Set environment variables for the test environment
	test-runtime	Controls how the tests will be executed.
Debugging	debug-keep-container	Keep the container after running for debugging.
	debug-traceback	Print full traceback when errors occur.
	build-verbosity	Increase/decrease the output of the build

These options can be specified in a pyproject.toml file, or as environment variables, see configuration docs.

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.
duckdb			DuckDB is an analytical in-process SQL database management system
pytorch-fairseq			Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
NumPy			The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
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
Tornado			Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Uses stable ABI for a small C extension.
MyPy			The compiled version of MyPy using MyPyC.
Prophet			Tool for producing high quality forecasts for time series data that has multiple seasonality with linear or non-linear growth.
Triton			Self hosted runners

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

v3.4.1

2 April 2026

• ⚠️ Building for the experimental CPython 3.13 free-threading variant is now deprecated. That functionality will be removed in the next minor release. The enable option cpython-freethreading is therefore also deprecated. Builds specifying enable = "all" no longer select cpython-freethreading. CPython 3.14 free-threading support remains available without the enable flag. (#2787)
• 🐛 iOS builds will no longer skip repair-wheel-command if it's defined in config (#2761)
• 🐛 Fix bug causing uv to fail when environments define PYTHON_VERSION or UV_PYTHON, conflicting with our venvs (#2795)
• ✨ cibuildwheel prints the selected build identifiers at the start of the build. (#2785)
• 🔐 The GitHub Action now references other actions with a full SHA (#2744)

v3.4.0

5 March 2026

• 🌟 You can now build wheels using uv as a build frontend. This should improve performance, especially if your project has lots of build dependencies. To use, set build-frontend to uv. (#2322)
• ⚠️ We no longer support running on Travis CI. It may continue working but we don't run tests there anymore so we can't be sure. (#2682)
• ✨ Improvements to building rust wheels on Android (#2650)
• 🛠 Update Pyodide to 0.29.3 (#2719, #2733)
• 🐛 Fix bug with the GitHub Action on Windows, where PATH was getting unnecessarily changed, causing issues with meson builds. (#2723)
• ✨ Add support for quiet setting on build and uv from the cibuildwheel build-verbosity setting. (#2737)
• 📚 Docs updates, including guidance on using Meson on Windows (#2718)

v3.3.1

5 January 2026

• 🛠 Update dependencies and container pins, including updating to CPython 3.14.2. (#2708)

v3.3.0

12 November 2025

• 🐛 Fix an incompatibility with Docker v29 (#2660)
• ✨ Adds test-runtime option, to customise how tests on simulated/emulated environments are run (#2636)
• ✨ Adds support for new manylinux_2_35 images on 32-bit ARM armv7l, offering better C++20 compatibility (#2656)
• ✨ build[uv] is now supported on Android (#2587)
• ✨ You can now install extras (such as uv) with a simple option on the GitHub Action (#2630)
• ✨ {project} and {package} placeholders are now supported in repair-wheel-command (#2589)
• 🛠 The versions set with dependency-versions no longer constrain packages specified by your build-system.requires. Previously, on platforms other than Linux, the constraints in this option would remain in the environment during the build. This has been tidied up make behaviour more consistent between platforms, and to prevent version conflicts. (#2583)
• 🛠 Improve the handling of test-command on Android, enabling more options to be passed (#2590)
• 📚 Docs improvements (#2618)

v3.2.1

12 October 2025

• 🛠 Update to CPython 3.14.0 final (#2614)
• 🐛 Fix the default MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET on Python 3.14 (#2613)
• 📚 Docs improvements (#2617)

---

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

Core:

• Joe Rickerby @joerick
• Yannick Jadoul @YannickJadoul
• Matthieu Darbois @mayeut
• Henry Schreiner @henryiii
• Grzegorz Bokota @Czaki
• Agriya Khetarpal @agriyakhetarpal (also Pyodide)

Platform maintainers:

• Russell Keith-Magee @freakboy3742 (iOS)
• Hood Chatham @hoodmane (Pyodide)
• Gyeongjae Choi @ryanking13 (Pyodide)
• Tim Felgentreff @timfel (GraalPy)
• Malcolm Smith @mhsmith (Android)

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.