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, 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 |
Android | iOS | Pyodide | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CPython 3.9 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| CPython 3.10 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| CPython 3.11 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| CPython 3.12 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | N/A | N/A | ✅3 |
| CPython 3.13 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CPython 3.14 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| CPython 3.15 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅4 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| PyPy 3.9 v7.3 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅1 | ✅1 | ✅1 | N/A | N/A | 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 | N/A | N/A |
| PyPy 3.11 v8.0 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅1 | ✅1 | ✅1 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| PyPy 3.12 v8.0 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅1 | ✅1 | ✅1 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| GraalPy 3.12 v25.0 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅1 | N/A | ✅1 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| GraalPy 3.13 v25.3 | N/A | ✅ | ✅ | N/A | N/A | ✅1 | N/A | ✅1 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
1 PyPy & GraalPy are only supported for manylinux wheels.
2 Windows arm64 support is experimental.
3 Not supported on PyPI, uses old pyodide tag instead of pyemscripten. Requires pyodide-eol enable.
4 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, Windows, pyemscripten, iOS, and Android wheels
- Supports CPython, PyPy, and GraalPy
- Works on GitHub Actions, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, and GitLab CI
- Bundles shared library dependencies on Linux through auditwheel, macOS through delocate, and Windows through delvewheel
- 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 | Android | iOS | Pyodide | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅4 | ✅3 | ✅ |
| Azure Pipelines | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅2 | ✅4 | ✅3 | ✅5 | |
| CircleCI | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅45 | ✅35 | ✅5 | ||
| GitLab CI | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅1 | ✅ | ✅45 | ✅35 | ✅5 |
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 Builds may work, but are untested in cibuildwheel's CI.
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: ${{ matrix.os }}
strategy:
matrix:
os: [ubuntu-latest, ubuntu-24.04-arm, windows-latest, windows-11-arm, macos-15-intel, macos-latest]
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v6
with:
persist-credentials: false
# Used to host cibuildwheel
- uses: actions/setup-python@v6
- name: Install cibuildwheel
run: python -m pip install cibuildwheel==4.3.3
- name: Build wheels
run: python -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse
# to supply options, put them in 'env', like:
# env:
# CIBW_SOME_OPTION: value
# ...
- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v6
with:
name: cibw-wheels-${{ 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.
| Option | Description | |
|---|---|---|
| Build selection | platform |
Override the auto-detected target platform |
buildskip |
Choose the Python versions to build | |
archs |
Change the architectures built on your machine by default. | |
project-requires-python |
Manually set the Python compatibility of your project | |
enable |
Enable building with extra categories of selectors present. | |
allow-empty |
Suppress the error code if no wheels match the specified build identifiers | |
| Build customization | build-frontend |
Set the tool to use to build, either "build" (default), "build[uv]", or "pip" |
config-settings |
Specify config-settings for the build backend. | |
environment |
Set environment variables | |
environment-pass |
Set environment variables on the host to pass-through to the container. | |
before-all |
Execute a shell command on the build system before any wheels are built. | |
before-build |
Execute a shell command preparing each wheel's build | |
xbuild-tools |
Binaries on the path that should be included in an isolated cross-build environment. | |
xbuild-files |
Platform-specific files in the build environment | |
repair-wheel-command |
Execute a shell command to repair each built wheel | |
manylinux-*-imagemusllinux-*-image |
Specify manylinux / musllinux container images | |
container-engine |
Specify the container engine to use when building Linux wheels | |
dependency-versions |
Control the versions of the tools cibuildwheel uses | |
pyodide-version |
Specify the Pyodide version to use for pyodide platform builds |
|
| Auditing | audit-requires |
Install Python dependencies for the audit step |
audit-command |
Use a tool to check wheels before the end of the run | |
| Testing | test-command |
The command to test each built wheel |
before-test |
Execute a shell command before testing each wheel | |
test-sources |
Paths that are copied into the working directory of the tests | |
test-requires |
Install Python dependencies before running the tests | |
test-extras |
Install your wheel for testing using extras_require |
|
test-groups |
Specify test dependencies from your project's dependency-groups |
|
test-skip |
Skip running tests on some builds | |
test-environment |
Set environment variables for the test environment | |
test-runtime |
Controls how the tests will be executed. | |
| Debugging | build-verbosity |
Increase/decrease the output of the build |
debug-keep-container |
Keep the container after running for debugging. | |
debug-traceback |
Print full traceback when errors occur. | |
log-fold-mode |
Control CI log folding. |
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 a high-performance analytical database system |
| NumPy |  |
|
The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python. |
| pytorch-fairseq | |
|
Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python. |
| 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 |
| Tornado | |
|
Tornado is a Python web framework and asynchronous networking library. Uses stable ABI for a small C extension. |
| 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. |
| Triton | |
|
Self hosted runners |
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, auditwheel, or delvewheel, 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
v4.3.3
21 October 2026
- 🔐 Updates manylinux images and pip to fix vulnerability to eMudhra.
v4.3.2
20 October 2026
- 🔐 Updates our dependency pins to certifi==2026.10.19, following the eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise. Linux builds may still be vulnerable through manylinux images - a patch release will soon follow if so.
v4.3.1
10 October 2026
- 🛠 Updates CPython 3.15 to the final 3.15.0 release (#3009)
v4.3.0
5 October 2026
- ✨ Extends option inheritance to every configuration layer, so global and platform-specific settings can append or prepend to existing values, including cibuildwheel's defaults. Environment variables can also extend earlier settings using
CIBW_INHERIT. (#2928) - ✨ Adds PyPy 3.12 support and updates PyPy 3.11 to v8.0.0, available with the
pypyenableflag (#2998) - ✨ Adds GraalPy 3.13 (v25.3) support on Linux, Windows, and macOS arm64, available with the
graalpyenableflag (#2982) - ✨ Adds
log-fold-modeto override CI log folding, includingCIBW_LOG_FOLD_MODE=disabledto keep build steps expanded (#2972) - ✨ Adds a
python-pathinput to the GitHub Action to choose the Python interpreter used to run cibuildwheel, and falls back to systempython3on runner architectures unsupported bysetup-python, such as native riscv64 (#2990) - 🐛 Fixes Windows command execution when paths or arguments contain shell metacharacters, including dependency specifiers containing
<or>(#2978) - 🛠 Improves readability of logged commands whose arguments contain quotes (#2993)
- 🛠 Updates Pyodide to 0.27.8, 0.29.5, and 314.0.7, and updates its build tooling, including auditwheel-emscripten 0.3.0 (#2996)
- 🛠 Updates dependencies and container pins, including CPython 3.15.0rc3 (#2986, #3003)
- 📚 Corrects references to
--archsin CLI help, error messages, and documentation (#2992)
v4.2.1
5 September 2026
- 🐛 Respects the NuGet package sources configured on the machine when installing CPython on Windows, instead of always falling back to nuget.org (#2966)
- 🐛 Fixes a
NameErroron Pyodide when an already-compatible wheel was reused, which made the test step fail (#2968) - 🛠 Updates the Android Python versions, and the Android testbed's Gradle version, making it compatible with Java 25 (#2962)
- 🛠 Updates dependencies including CPython 3.15.0rc2 (#2965, #2970, #2976, #2981, #2985)
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
- Agriya Khetarpal @agriyakhetarpal (also Pyodide)
Platform maintainers:
- Russell Keith-Magee @freakboy3742 (iOS)
- 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.
Release files for cibuildwheel 4.3.3
For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.
Source distribution (sdist)
| File | Size | Uploaded | Provenance | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cibuildwheel-4.3.3.tar.gz | 461.6 kB | With provenance | Details |
Built distribution (wheel)
| File | Interpreter | ABI | Platform | Reset |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cibuildwheel-4.3.3-py3-none-any.whl | Python 3 | none | any | Details |
Total release size: 630.9 kB
Release files / cibuildwheel-4.3.3.tar.gz
| Download URL | cibuildwheel-4.3.3.tar.gz |
|---|---|
| Size | 461.6 kB |
| Tags | Source |
|
SHA-256 checksum How to use checksums |
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| Tags | Python 3 |
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Uploaded using Trusted Publishing? What is trusted publishing? |
Yes |
| Uploaded via |
twine/7.0.0 CPython/3.13.14
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PyPI verified that this artifact, at this checksum, originated from the publisher listed below.
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Transparency logSecurity for cibuildwheel 4.3.3
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Signed by GitHub Actions, verified by PyPI on Oct 21, 2026.
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