cibuildwheel

cibuildwheel 2.19 is out, with some very big additions. A new platform, Pyodide, has been added for building WebAssembly wheels. We’ve added CPython 3.13 free-threaded builds, now on all OS’s. And we have an opt-in speed improvement with the build[uv] build-frontend option.

We’ve had some fantastic releases of cibuildwheel since my last post over 2.10, so I’ll include a few of the new features from those releases, too, with a highlight on a larger feature that can use more explaining: inherit for overrides.

cibuildwheel 2.10 is out, with some important additions. PEP 517 config settings added, --only (which has an interesting use in GHA), and Cirrus CI support (including our first Apple Silicon native runner!) are highlights. We also support Python 3.11 now (as of 2.11.2, RC’s in older releases).

We’ve had some fantastic releases of cibuildwheel this year, including some very powerful features you might be interested in using, and I haven’t covered releases since 2.2, so let’s take an in-depth look at what’s new for this and the last few releases!

Another great release from cibuildwheel, 2.2.0, is out! There are a few important additions in this release that you should be aware of, so I will outline the major changes here. We will cover the new musllinux wheels, overload configuration, and incoming changes to pip and PyPy expected in the next release. As always, it is recommended that you pin your cibuildwheel version and then provide some automated way to keep the pin up-to-date, such as GitHub’s dependabot. You should be updating just before you make a release, as well, but you probably don’t want to be surprised by new wheels during your release process!

The cibuildwheel package has just had a major release with some fantastic features. Python 2.7 and 3.5 support has been removed (and PyPy3.6), allowing us to update to the latest manylinux and auditwheel versions, and support the newly unified manylinux PyPy3.7 images. We now allow users to select pypa/build as a build frontend. We now have a custom option to enable pre-release Pythons (3.10 currently) for testing before they are ABI stable (please don’t release wheels until that happens). Maybe most exciting, cibuildwheel now supports configuration in pyproject.toml, allowing you to be even further isolated from dependence on your CI system; you can easily produce Linux and Windows wheels locally (macOS still installs to system locations). And, since my last post and introduction post, cibuildwheel is now part of the PyPA!

cibuildwheel has just had two back-to-back releases, two weeks apart, representing several months of hard work and some exciting few features! I will be covering both releases at once, so we will discuss Apple Silicon support, architecture emulation on Linux, integrated PEP 621 Requires-Python support, the native GitHub Action, extended build and test controls, and more!

If you are following the releases, 1.7.0 came out last November (2020), and included the fantastic output folding feature, which makes logs much easier to read on CI systems that support folding, and makes it much easier to see how long each step takes. The 1.7.x series also included the addition of the working examples section of the documentation, which tracks some known projects using cibuildwheel, such as scikit-learn, Matlotlib, and MyPy; it is a great place to go to look into how other projects have integrated cibuildwheel into their workflow.

I have an general overview post as well. Now let’s look at what’s new! Update: cibuildwheel is now an official package of the PyPA!

This is the first of two posts on cibuildwheel, a fantastic project I joined after switching to it from my own azure-wheel-helpers, which I’ve blogged about here before. It is the best wheelbuilding system available for Python today, and can make something that is normally a pain to setup and a headache to maintain a breeze (by forcing all the headaches on us, of course, as maintainers, but it’s better to solve issues centrally! Obviously we rather like solving these problems. Or we are just crazy, which is also possible ;) ).

Be sure to checkout the followup post over new features in 1.8.0 and 1.9.0, too! Also, cibuildwheel was recently accepted into the PyPA!