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Python wheels are great. Building them acrossMac, Linux, Windows, onmultiple 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.

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:

^{¹ PyPy is only supported for manylinux wheels.
² Windows arm64 support is experimental.
³ Free-threaded mode requires opt-in usingCIBW_ENABLE.
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 throughauditwheel anddelocate
• Runs your library's tests against the wheel-installed version of your library

See thecibuildwheel 1 documentation if you need to build unsupported versions of Python, such as Python 2.

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

^{¹Requires 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.
²Uses cross-compilation. It is not possible to testarm64 on this CI platform.
³ Requires a macOS runner; runs tests on the simulator for the runner's architecture.}

To build manylinux, musllinux, macOS, and Windows wheels on GitHub Actions, you could use this.github/workflows/wheels.yml:

name:Buildon:[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, macos-13, macos-latest]steps:      -uses:actions/checkout@v4# Used to host cibuildwheel      -uses:actions/setup-python@v5      -name:Install cibuildwheelrun:python -m pip install cibuildwheel==2.23.0      -name:Build wheelsrun:python -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse# to supply options, put them in 'env', like:# env:#   CIBW_SOME_OPTION: value#   ...      -uses:actions/upload-artifact@v4with: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 thedocumentation and theexamples.

The following diagram summarises the steps that cibuildwheel takes on each platform.

^{Explore an interactive version of this diagramin the docs.}

These options can be specified in a pyproject.toml file, as well; seeconfiguration.

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
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.
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 theWorking Examples page in the docs.

Sincecibuildwheel repairs the wheel withdelocate orauditwheel, 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.

1 March 2025

• ✨ Adds official support for the new GitHub Actions Arm runners. In fact these worked out-of-the-box, now we include them in our tests and example configs. (#2135 via #2281)
• ✨ Adds support for building PyPy 3.11 wheels (#2268 via #2281)
• 🛠 Adopts the beta pypa/manylinux image for armv7l builds (#2269 via #2281)
• 🛠 Dependency updates, including Pyodide 0.27 (#2117 and #2281)

23 November 2024

• 🌟 Added a newCIBW_ENABLE/enable feature that replacesCIBW_FREETHREADED_SUPPORT/free-threaded-support andCIBW_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. UseCIBW_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 inCIBW_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 whenuname -m fails on ARM (#2049)
• 🛠 Better error when repair fails and docs for abi3audit on Windows (#2058)
• 🛠 Better error whenmanylinux-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)

9 October 2024

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

2 October 2024

• ✨ Adds support for building 32-bit armv7l wheels on musllinux. On a Linux system with emulation set up, setCIBW_ARCHS toarmv7l 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 defaultmanylinux image isscheduled to change frommanylinux2014 tomanylinux_2_28 in a cibuildwheel release on or after6th May 2025 - you can set the value now to avoid getting upgraded if you want. (#1992)

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 uponuv to install dependencies for versions of CPython that it does not support (#2005)
• 🐛 Fix a bug whereuv 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)

That's the last few versions.

ℹ️Want more changelog? Head over tothe changelog page in the docs.

For more info on how to contribute to cibuildwheel, see thedocs.

Everyone interacting with the cibuildwheel project via codebase, issue tracker, chat rooms, or otherwise is expected to follow thePSF Code of Conduct.

• Joe Rickerby@joerick
• Yannick Jadoul@YannickJadoul
• Matthieu Darbois@mayeut
• Henry Schreiner@henryiii
• Grzegorz Bokota@Czaki

cibuildwheel stands on the shoulders of giants.

• ⭐️ @matthew-brett formultibuild andmatthew-brett/delocate
• @PyPA for the manylinux Docker imagespypa/manylinux
• @ogrisel forwheelhouse-uploader andrun_with_env.cmd

Massive props also to-

• @zfrenchee forhelp debugging many issues
• @lelit for some great bug reports andcontributions
• @mayeut for aphenomenal 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

Another very similar tool to consider ismatthew-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. Seematurin-action for a tool that is optimized for building Rust wheels and cross-compiling.