cibuildwheel

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?

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	Pyodide
CPython 3.6	✅	N/A	✅	✅	N/A	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
CPython 3.7	✅	N/A	✅	✅	N/A	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
CPython 3.8	✅	✅	✅	✅	N/A	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
CPython 3.9	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
CPython 3.10	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
CPython 3.11	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
CPython 3.12	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	✅⁴
CPython 3.13³	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅²	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅⁵	N/A
PyPy 3.7 v7.3	✅	N/A	✅	N/A	N/A	✅¹	✅¹	✅¹	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
PyPy 3.8 v7.3	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅¹	✅¹	✅¹	N/A	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
PyPy 3.10 v7.3	✅	✅	✅	N/A	N/A	✅¹	✅¹	✅¹	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A

^{¹ PyPy is only supported for manylinux wheels.}
^{² Windows arm64 support is experimental.}
^{³ Free-threaded mode requires 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.}
^{⁵ manylinux armv7l support is experimental. As there are no RHEL based image for this architecture, it's using an Ubuntu based image instead.}

Builds manylinux, musllinux, macOS 10.9+ (10.13+ for Python 3.12+), 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-latest]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      # Used to host cibuildwheel
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.22.0

      - 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

v2.22.0

23 November 2024

🌟 Added a new CIBW_ENABLE/enable feature that replaces CIBW_FREETHREADED_SUPPORT/free-threaded-support and CIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS with a system that supports both. In cibuildwheel 3, this will also include a PyPy setting and the deprecated options will be removed. (#2048)
🌟 Dependency groups are now supported for tests. Use CIBW_TEST_GROUPS/test-groups to specify groups in [dependency-groups] for testing. (#2063)
🌟 Support for the experimental Ubuntu-based ARMv7l manylinux image (#2052)
✨ Show a warning when cibuildwheel is run from Python 3.10 or older; cibuildwheel 3.0 will require Python 3.11 or newer as host (#2050)
🐛 Fix issue with stderr interfering with checking the docker version (#2074)
🛠 Python 3.9 is now used in CIBW_BEFORE_ALL/before-all on linux, replacing 3.8, which is now EoL (#2043)
🛠 Error messages for producing a pure-Python wheel are slightly more informative (#2044)
🛠 Better error when uname -m fails on ARM (#2049)
🛠 Better error when repair fails and docs for abi3audit on Windows (#2058)
🛠 Better error when manylinux-interpreters ensure fails (#2066)
🛠 Update Pyodide to 0.26.4, and adapt to the unbundled pyodide-build (now 0.29) (#2090)
🛠 Now cibuildwheel uses dependency-groups for development dependencies (#2064, #2085)
📚 Docs updates and tidy ups (#2061, #2067, #2072)

v2.21.3

9 October 2024

🛠 Update CPython 3.13 to 3.13.0 final release (#2032)
📚 Docs updates and tidy ups (#2035)

v2.21.2

2 October 2024

✨ Adds support for building 32-bit armv7l wheels on musllinux. On a Linux system with emulation set up, set CIBW_ARCHS to armv7l on Linux to try it out if you're interested! (#2017)
🐛 Fix Linux Podman builds on some systems (#2016)
✨ Adds official support for running on Python 3.13 (#2026)
🛠 Update CPython 3.13 to 3.13.0rc3 (#2029)

Note: the default manylinux image is scheduled to change from manylinux2014 to manylinux_2_28 in a cibuildwheel release on or after 6th May 2025 - you can set the value now to avoid getting upgraded if you want. (#1992)

v2.21.1

16 September 2024

🐛 Fix a bug in the Linux build, where files copied to the container would have invalid ownership permissions (#2007)
🐛 Fix a bug on Windows where cibuildwheel would call upon uv to install dependencies for versions of CPython that it does not support (#2005)
🐛 Fix a bug where uv 0.4.10 would not use the right Python when testing on Linux. (#2008)
🛠 Bump our documentation pins, fixes an issue with a missing package (#2011)

v2.21.0

13 September 2024

⚠️ Update CPython 3.12 to 3.12.6, which changes the macOS minimum deployment target on CPython 3.12 from macOS 10.9 to macOS 10.13 (#1998)
🛠 Changes the behaviour when inheriting config-settings in TOML overrides - rather than extending each key, which is rarely useful, individual keys will override previously set values. (#1803)
🛠 Update CPython 3.13 to 3.13.0rc2 (#1998)
✨ Adds support for multiarch OCI images (#1961)
🐛 Fixes some bugs building Linux wheels on macOS. (#1961)
⚠️ Changes the minimum version of Docker/Podman to Docker API version 1.43, Podman API version 3. The only mainstream runner this should affect is Travis Graviton2 runners - if so you can upgrade your version of Docker. (#1961)

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

Oven

cibuildwheel2.22.0

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