cibuildwheel is here to help. cibuildwheel runs on your CI server - currently it supports Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, and CircleCI - and it builds and tests your wheels across all of your platforms.

cibuildwheel is in beta. It's brand new - I'd love for you to try it and help make it better!

What does it do?

	macOS 10.6+	manylinux i686	manylinux x86_64	Windows 32bit	Windows 64bit
Python 2.7	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Python 3.4	✅	✅	✅	✅*	✅*
Python 3.5	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Python 3.6	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅
Python 3.7	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅

* Not supported on Azure Pipelines

Builds manylinux, macOS and Windows (32 and 64bit) wheels using Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, AppVeyor, and CircleCI
Bundles shared library dependencies on Linux and macOS through auditwheel and delocate
Runs the library test suite against the wheel-installed version of your library

Usage

cibuildwheel currently works Travis CI and CircleCI to build Linux and Mac wheels, and AppVeyor to build Windows wheels. Azure Pipelines supports all three.

	Linux	macOS	Windows
Azure Pipelines	✅	✅	✅
Travis CI	✅	✅
AppVeyor			✅
CircleCI	✅	✅

cibuildwheel is not intended to run on your development machine. It will try to install packages globally; this is no good. Travis CI, CircleCI, and AppVeyor run their builds in isolated environments, so are ideal for this kind of script.

Linux builds on Docker

Linux wheels are built in the manylinux1 docker images to provide binary compatible wheels on Linux, according to PEP 513. Because of this, when building with cibuildwheel on Linux, a few things should be taken into account:

Programs and libraries cannot be installed on the Travis CI Ubuntu host with apt-get, but can be installed inside of the Docker image using yum or manually. The same goes for environment variables that are potentially needed to customize the wheel building. cibuildwheel supports this by providing the CIBW_ENVIRONMENT and CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD options to setup the build environment inside the running Docker image. See below for details on these options.
The project directory is mounted in the running Docker instance as /project, the output directory for the wheels as /output. In general, this is handled transparently by cibuildwheel. For a more finegrained level of control however, the root of the host file system is mounted as /host, allowing for example to access shared files, caches, etc. on the host file system. Note that this is not available on CircleCI due to their Docker policies.
Alternative dockers images can be specified with the CIBW_MANYLINUX1_X86_64_IMAGE and CIBW_MANYLINUX1_I686_IMAGE options to allow for a custom, preconfigured build environment for the Linux builds. See below for more details.

Options

usage: cibuildwheel [-h] [--platform {auto,linux,macos,windows}]
                    [--output-dir OUTPUT_DIR] [--print-build-identifiers]
                    [project_dir]
    
Build wheels for all the platforms.

positional arguments:
  project_dir           Path to the project that you want wheels for.
                        Default: the current directory.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --platform {auto,linux,macos,windows}
                        Platform to build for. For "linux" you need docker
                        running, on Mac or Linux. For "macos", you need a Mac
                        machine, and note that this script is going to
                        automatically install MacPython on your system, so
                        don't run on your development machine. For "windows",
                        you need to run in Windows, and it will build and test
                        for all versions of Python at C:\PythonXX[-x64].
  --output-dir OUTPUT_DIR
                        Destination folder for the wheels.
  --print-build-identifiers
                        Print the build identifiers matched by the current
                        invocation and exit.

Example YML syntax

example .travis.yml environment variables

env:
  global:
    - CIBW_TEST_REQUIRES=nose
    - CIBW_TEST_COMMAND="nosetests {project}/tests"

example appveyor.yml environment variables

environment:
  global:
    CIBW_TEST_REQUIRES: nose
    CIBW_TEST_COMMAND: "nosetests {project}\\tests"

Delivering to PyPI

After you've built your wheels, you'll probably want to deliver them to PyPI.

Manual method

On your development machine, do the following...

# Clear out your 'dist' folder. 
rm -rf dist
# Make a source distribution
python setup.py sdist

# 🏃🏻
# Go and download your wheel files from wherever you put them. Put 
# them all into the 'dist' folder.

# Upload using 'twine' (you may need to 'pip install twine')
twine upload dist/*

Semi-automatic method using wheelhouse-uploader

Obviously, manual steps are for chumps, so we can automate this a little by using wheelhouse-uploader.

Quick note from me - using S3 as a storage didn't work due to a bug in libcloud. Feel free to use my fork of that package that fixes the bug pip install https://github.com/joerick/libcloud/archive/v1.5.0-s3fix.zip

Automatic method

If you don't need much control over the release of a package, you can set up cibuildwheel to deliver the wheels straight to PyPI. This doesn't require any cloud storage to work - you just need to bump the version and tag it.

Check out this example repo for instructions on how to set this up.

It didn't work!

If your wheel didn't compile, check the list below for some debugging tips.

A mistake in your config. To quickly test your config without doing a git push and waiting for your code to build on CI, you can run the Linux build in a Docker container. On Mac or Linux, with Docker running, try cibuildwheel --platform linux. You'll have to bring your config into the current environment first.
Missing dependency. You might need to install something on the build machine. You can do this in .travis.yml, appveyor.yml, or .circleci/config.yml, with apt-get, brew or whatever Windows uses :P . Given how the Linux build works, we'll probably have to build something into cibuildwheel. Let's chat about that over in the issues!
Windows: missing C feature. The Windows C compiler doesn't support C language features invented after 1990, so you'll have to backport your C code to C90. For me, this mostly involved putting my variable declarations at the top of the function like an animal.
MacOS: calling cibuildwheel from a python3 script and getting a ModuleNotFoundError? Due to a bug in CPython, you'll need to unset the __PYVENV_LAUNCHER__ variable before activating a venv.

Working examples

Here are some repos that use cibuildwheel.

Add repo here! Send a PR.

Legal note

Since cibuildwheel runs the wheel through 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.

Changelog

0.12.0

29 September 2019

✨ Add CIBW_TEST_EXTRAS option, to allow testing using extra_require options. For example, set CIBW_TEST_EXTRAS=test,qt to make the wheel installed with pip install <wheel_file>[test,qt]
🛠 Update Python from 3.7.2 to 3.7.4 on macOS
🛠 Update OpenSSL patch to 1.0.2t on macOS

0.11.1

28 May 2019

🐛 Fix missing file in the release tarball, that was causing problems with Windows builds (#141)

0.11.0

26 May 2019

✨ Add support for building on Azure pipelines! This lets you build all Linux, Mac and Windows wheels on one service, so it promises to be the easiest to set up! Check out the quickstart in the docs, or cibuildwheel-azure-example for an example project. (#126, #132)
🛠 Internal change - the end-to-end test projects format was updated, so we can more precisely assert what should be produced for each one. (#136, #137).

0.10.2

10 March 2019

🛠 Revert temporary fix in macOS, that was working around a bug in pip 19 (#129)
🛠 Update Python to 2.7.16 on macOS
🛠 Update OpenSSL patch to 1.0.2r on macOS

0.10.1

3 February 2019

🐛 Fix build stalling on macOS (that was introduced in pip 19) (#122)
🐛 Fix "AttributeError: 'Popen' object has no attribute 'args'" on Python 2.7 for Linux builds (#108)
🛠 Update Python from 3.6.7, 3.7.1 to 3.6.8, 3.7.2 on macOS
🛠 Update openssl patch from 1.0.2p to 1.0.2q on macOS
🛠 Sorting build options dict items when printing preamble (#114)

0.10.0

23 September 2018

✨ Add CIBW_BUILD option, for specifying which specific builds to perform (#101)
✨ Add support for building Mac and Linux on CircleCI (#91, #97)
🛠 Improved support for building universal wheels (#95)
🛠 Ensure log output is unbuffered and therefore in the correct order (#92)
🛠 Improved error reporting for errors that occur inside a package's setup.py (#88)
⚠️ Removed support for Python 3.3 on Windows.

0.9.4

29 July 2018

🛠 CIBW_TEST_COMMAND now runs in a shell on Mac (as well as Linux) (#81)

0.9.3

10 July 2018

🛠 Update to Python 3.6.6 on macOS (#82)
✨ Add support for building Python 3.7 wheels on Windows (#76)
⚠️ Deprecated support for Python 3.3 on Windows.

0.9.2

1 July 2018

🛠 Update Python 3.7.0rc1 to 3.7.0 on macOS (#79)

0.9.1

18 June 2018

🛠 Removed the need to use {python} and {pip} in CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD statements, by ensuring the correct version is always on the path at python and pip instead. (#60)
🛠 We now patch the _ssl module on Python 3.4 and 3.5 so these versions can still make SSL web requests using TLS 1.2 while building. (#71)

0.9.0

18 June 2018

✨ Add support for Python 3.7 (#73)

0.8.0

4 May 2018

⚠️ Drop support for Python 3.3 on Linux (#67)
🐛 Fix TLS by updating setuptools (#69)

0.7.1

2 April 2017

🐛 macOS: Fix Pip bugs resulting from PyPI TLS 1.2 enforcement
🐛 macOS: Fix brew Python3 version problems in the CI

0.7.0

7 January 2018

✨ You can now specify a custom docker image using the CIBW_MANYLINUX1_X86_64_IMAGE and CIBW_MANYLINUX1_I686_IMAGE options. (#46)
🐛 Fixed a bug where cibuildwheel would download and build a package from PyPI(!) instead of building the package on the local machine. (#51)

0.6.0

9 October 2017

✨ On the Linux build, the host filesystem is now accessible via /host (#36)
🐛 Fixed a bug where setup.py scripts would run the wrong version of Python when running subprocesses on Linux (#35)

0.5.1

10 September 2017

🐛 Fixed a couple of bugs on Python 3.
✨ Added experimental support for Mac builds on Bitrise.io

0.5.0

7 September 2017

✨ CIBW_ENVIRONMENT added. You can now set environment variables for each build, even within the Docker container on Linux. This is a big one! (#21)
✨ CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD now runs in a system shell on all platforms. You can now do things like CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD="cmd1 && cmd2". (#32)

0.4.1

14 August 2017

🐛 Fixed a bug on Windows where subprocess' output was hidden (#23)
🐛 Fixed a bug on AppVeyor where logs would appear in the wrong order due to output buffering (#24, thanks @YannickJadoul!)

0.4.0

23 July 2017

🐛 Fixed a bug that was increasing the build time by building the wheel twice. This was a problem for large projects that have a long build time. If you're upgrading and you need the old behaviour, use CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD={pip} install ., or install exactly the dependencies you need in CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD. See #18.

0.3.0

27 June 2017

⚠️ Removed Python 2.6 support on Linux (#12)

0.2.1

11 June 2017

🛠 Changed the build process to install the package before building the wheel - this allows direct dependencies to be installed first (#9, thanks @tgarc!)
✨ Added Python 3 support for the main process, for systems where Python 3 is the default (#8, thanks @tgarc).

0.2.0

13 April 2017

✨ Added CIBW_SKIP option, letting users explicitly skip a build
✨ Added CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD option, letting users run a shell command before the build starts

0.1.3

31 March 2017

🌟 First public release!

Contributing

Wheel-building is pretty complex. I expect users to find many edge-cases - please help the rest of the community out by documenting these, adding features to support them, and reporting bugs.

I plan to be pretty liberal in accepting pull requests, as long as they align with the design goals below.

cibuildwheel is indie open source. I'm not paid to work on this.

Design Goals

cibuildwheel should wrap the complexity of wheel building.
The user interface to cibuildwheel is the build script (e.g. .travis.yml). Feature additions should not increase the complexity of this script.
Options should be environment variables (these lend themselves better to YML config files). They should be prefixed with CIBW_.
Options should be generalise to all platforms. If platform-specific options are required, they should be namespaced e.g. CIBW_TEST_COMMAND_MACOS

Other notes:

The platforms are very similar, until they're not. I'd rather have straight-forward code than totally DRY code, so let's keep airy platfrom abstractions to a minimum.
I might want to break the options into a shared config file one day, so that config is more easily shared. That has motivated some of the design decisions.

Maintainers

Joe Rickerby @joerick
Tomas Garcia @tgarc
Yannick Jadoul @YannickJadoul
Matthieu Darbois @mayeut

Credits

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!

README.md Unescape Escape

cibuildwheel