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?

	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.

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
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.}

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@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.

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

	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.

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.
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.

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

v2.20.0

• 🌟 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)

v2.19.2

• 🐛 Update manylinux2014 pins to versions that support past-EoL CentOS 7 mirrors. (#1917)
• 🐛 Support --no-isolation with build[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)

v2.19.1

• 🐛 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)

v2.19.0

See the release post for more info on new features!

• 🌟 Add Pyodide platform. Set with --platform pyodide or CIBW_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 install cibuildwheel[uv]) and use uv 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)

v2.18.1

• 🌟 Add free-threaded Linux and Windows builds for 3.13. New identifiers cp313t-*, new option CIBW_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.

---

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.