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, 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:

^{¹ PyPy & GraalPy are only supported for manylinux wheels.
² Windows arm64 support is experimental.
³ Free-threaded mode requires opt-in on 3.13 using 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, 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 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:

^{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.
³ Requires a macOS runner; runs tests on the simulator for the runner's architecture.
⁴ Building for Android requires the runner to be Linux x86_64, macOS ARM64 or macOS x86_64. Testing has additional requirements.
⁵ The macos-15 and macos-latest images are incompatible with cibuildwheel at this time}
when building iOS wheels.

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, ubuntu-24.04-arm, windows-latest, windows-11-arm, macos-15-intel, macos-latest]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v5

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

      - name: Install cibuildwheel
        run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==3.2.1

      - 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.}

These options can be specified in a pyproject.toml file, or as environment variables, see configuration docs.

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.
duckdb			DuckDB is an analytical in-process SQL database management system
pytorch-fairseq			Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.
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 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

v3.2.1

12 October 2025

• 🛠 Update to CPython 3.14.0 final (#2614)
• 🐛 Fix the default MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET on Python 3.14 (#2613)
• 📚 Docs improvements (#2617)

v3.2.0

22 September 2025

• ✨ Adds GraalPy v25 (Python 3.12) support (#2597)
• 🛠 Update to CPython 3.14.0rc3 (#2602)
• 🛠 Adds CPython 3.14.0 prerelease support for Android, and a number of improvements to Android builds (#2568, #2591)
• 🛠 Improvements to testing on Android, passing environment markers when installing the venv, and providing more debug output when build-verbosity is set (#2575)
• ⚠️ PyPy 3.10 was moved to pypy-eol in the enable option, as it is now end-of-life. (#2521)
• 📚 Docs improvements (#2574, #2601, #2598)

v3.1.4

19 August 2025

• ✨ Add a --clean-cache command to clean up our cache (#2489)
• 🛠 Update Python to 3.14rc2 and other patch version bumps (#2542, #2556)
• 🛠 Update Pyodide to 0.28.2 (#2562, #2558)
• 🐛 Fix resolution with pyodide-build when dependency-versions is set (#2548)
• 🐛 Set CMAKE_FIND_ROOT_PATH_MODE_PACKAGE to BOTH on Android (#2547)
• 🐛 Add patchelf dependency for platforms that can build Android wheels (#2552)
• 🐛 Ignore empty values for CIBW_ARCHS like most other environment variables (#2541)
• 💼 The color and suggest_on_error argparse options are now default in 3.14rc1+ (#2554)
• 💼 Use the virtualenv release URL instead of blob URL (should be more robust) (#2555)
• 🧪 For iOS, lowering to macos-14 is needed for now due to issues with GitHub's runner images (#2557)
• 🧪 Split out platforms iOS and Android in our tests (#2519)
• 🧪 Fix and enable doctests (#2546)
• 📚 Improve our docs on free-threading (#2549)

v3.1.3

1 August 2025

• 🐛 Fix bug where "latest" dependencies couldn't update to pip 25.2 on Windows (#2537)
• 🧪 Use pytest-rerunfailures to improve some of our iOS/Android tests (#2527, #2539)
• 🧪 Remove some GraalPy Windows workarounds in our tests (#2501)

v3.1.2

29 July 2025

• ⚠️ Add an error if CIBW_FREE_THREADING_SUPPORT is set; you are likely missing 3.13t wheels, please use the enable/CIBW_ENABLE (#2520)
• 🛠 riscv64 now enabled if you target that architecture, it's now supported on PyPI (#2509)
• 🛠 Add warning when using cpython-experimental-riscv64 (no longer needed) (#2526, #2528)
• 🛠 iOS versions bumped, fixing issues with 3.14 (now RC 1) (#2530)
• 🐛 Fix bug in Android running wheel from our GitHub Action (#2517)
• 🐛 Fix warning when using test-skip of "*-macosx_universal2:arm64" (#2522)
• 🐛 Fix incorrect number of wheels reported in logs, again (#2517)
• 📚 We welcome our Android platform maintainer (#2516)

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

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)
• Malcolm Smith @mhsmith (Android)

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.