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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, 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 & GraalPy are only supported for manylinux wheels.
² Windows arm64 support is experimental.
³ Free-threaded mode requires opt-in usingenable.
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, PyPy, and GraalPy
• Works on GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, Travis CI, 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, windows-11-arm, 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==3.0.1      -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, or as environment variables, seeconfiguration docs.

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.
duckdb			DuckDB is an analytical in-process SQL database management system
NumPy			The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python.
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.

5 July 2025

• 🛠 Updates CPython 3.14 prerelease to 3.14.0b3 (#2471)
• ✨ Adds a CPython 3.14 prerelease iOS build (only when prerelease builds areenabled) (#2475)

11 June 2025

See @henryiii'srelease post for more info on new features!

• 🌟 Adds the ability tobuild wheels for iOS! Set theplatform option toios on a Mac with the iOS toolchain to try it out! (#2286, #2363, #2432)

• 🌟 Adds support for the GraalPy interpreter! Enable for your project using theenable option. (#1538, #2411, #2414)

• ✨ Adds CPython 3.14 support, under theenable optioncpython-prerelease. This version of cibuildwheel uses 3.14.0b2. (#2390)

  While CPython is in beta, the ABI can change, so your wheels might not be compatible with the final release. For this reason, we don't recommend distributing wheels until RC1, at which point 3.14 will be available in cibuildwheel without the flag. (#2390)

• ✨ Adds thetest-sources option, and changes the working directory for tests. (#2062, #2284, #2437)

  • If this option is set, cibuildwheel will copy the files and folders specified intest-sources into the temporary directory we run from. This is required for iOS builds, but also useful for other platforms, as it allows you to avoid placeholders.
  • If this option is not set, behaviour matches v2.x - cibuildwheel will run the tests from a temporary directory, and you can use the{project} placeholder in thetest-command to refer to the project directory. (#2420)

• ✨ Addsdependency-versions inline syntax (#2122)

• ✨ Improves support for Pyodide builds and adds the experimentalpyodide-version option, which allows you to specify the version of Pyodide to use for builds. (#2002)

• ✨ Addpyodide-prereleaseenable option, with an early build of 0.28 (Python 3.13). (#2431)

• ✨ Adds thetest-environment option, which allows you to set environment variables for the test command. (#2388)

• ✨ Adds thexbuild-tools option, which allows you to specify tools safe for cross-compilation. Currently only used on iOS; will be useful for Android in the future. (#2317)

• 🛠 The defaultmanylinux image has changed frommanylinux2014 tomanylinux_2_28. (#2330)

• 🛠 EOL imagesmanylinux1,manylinux2010,manylinux_2_24 andmusllinux_1_1 can no longer be specified by their shortname. The full OCI name can still be used for these images, if you wish. (#2316)

• 🛠 Invokesbuild rather thanpip wheel to build wheels by default. You can control this via thebuild-frontend option. You might notice that you can see your build log output now! (#2321)

• 🛠 Build verbosity settings have been reworked to have consistent meanings between build backends when non-zero. (#2339)

• 🛠 Removed theCIBW_PRERELEASE_PYTHONS andCIBW_FREE_THREADED_SUPPORT options - these have been folded into theenable option instead. (#2095)

• 🛠 Build environments no longer have setuptools and wheel preinstalled. (#2329)

• 🛠 Use the standard Schema line for the integrated JSONSchema. (#2433)

• ⚠️ Dropped support for building Python 3.6 and 3.7 wheels. If you need to build wheels for these versions, use cibuildwheel v2.23.3 or earlier. (#2282)

• ⚠️ The minimum Python version required to run cibuildwheel is now Python 3.11. You can still build wheels for Python 3.8 and newer. (#1912)

• ⚠️ 32-bit Linux wheels no longer built by default - thearch was removed from"auto". It now requires explicit"auto32". Note that modern manylinux images (like the new default,manylinux_2_28) do not have 32-bit versions. (#2458)

• ⚠️ PyPy wheels no longer built by default, due to a change to our options system. To continue building PyPy wheels, you'll now need to set theenable option topypy orpypy-eol. (#2095)

• ⚠️ Dropped official support for Appveyor. If it was working for you before, it will probably continue to do so, but we can't be sure, because our CI doesn't run there anymore. (#2386)

• 📚 A reorganisation of the docs, and numerous updates. (#2280)

• 📚 Use Python 3.14 color output in docs CLI output. (#2407)

• 📚 Docs now primarily use the pyproject.toml name of options, rather than the environment variable name. (#2389)

• 📚 README table now matches docs and auto-updates. (#2427, #2428)

26 April 2025

• 🛠 Dependency updates, including Python 3.13.3 (#2371)

24 March 2025

• 🐛 Workaround an issue with pyodide builds when running cibuildwheel with a Python that was installed via UV (#2328 via #2331)
• 🛠 Dependency updates, including a manylinux update that fixes an'undefined symbol' error in gcc-toolset (#2334)

15 March 2025

• ⚠️ Added warnings when the shorthand valuesmanylinux1,manylinux2010,manylinux_2_24, andmusllinux_1_1 are used to specify the images in linux builds. The shorthand to these (unmaintainted) images will be removed in v3.0. If you want to keep using these images, explicitly opt-in using the full image URL, which can be found inthis file. (#2312)
• 🛠 Dependency updates, including a manylinux update which fixes anissue with rustup. (#2315)

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.

Core:

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

Platform maintainers:

• Russell Keith-Magee@freakboy3742 (iOS)
• Agriya Khetarpal@agriyakhetarpal (Pyodide)
• Hood Chatham@hoodmane (Pyodide)
• Gyeongjae Choi@ryanking13 (Pyodide)
• Tim Felgentreff@timfel (GraalPy)

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.