mojox-build 0.4.0

PEP 517 / PEP 660 build backend for Mojo libraries (compiles .mojo packages into wheels).

mojox-build

PEP 517 + PEP 660 build backend that compiles a Mojo library into a .whl.

Quickstart

# pyproject.toml
[project]
name = "boucle"
version = "0.2.0"
description = "Async event loop primitives for Mojo"
readme = "README.md"
license = "Apache-2.0"
requires-python = ">=3.10"
dependencies = ["mojox", "mojo-compiler>=1.0.0b2,<2"]

[build-system]
requires      = ["mojox-build>=0.4", "mojo-compiler>=1.0.0b2,<2"]
build-backend = "mojox_build"

[tool.mojox-build]
# Either a src/ layout (default):
package-root = "src"
# Or an explicit list of packages at the repo root:
# packages = ["boucle"]

uv build produces dist/boucle-0.2.0-py3-none-<platform>.whl containing boucle.mojoc at boucle-0.2.0.data/platlib/mojo_packages/boucle.mojoc (.mojopkg on Mojo < 1.0). When installed, it lands in the venv's site-packages/mojo_packages/, which mojox discovers automatically.

[tool.mojox-build] reference

Key	Type	Default	Purpose
package-root	str	"src"	Directory containing top-level package dirs to compile.
packages	list[str]	(auto-scan package-root)	Explicit list of source directories. Each becomes one compiled package (.mojoc, or .mojopkg on Mojo < 1.0).
native-libs	list[str]	[]	Pre-built .so / .dylib files to copy into mojo_packages/lib/.
defines	table	{}	-D KEY=VALUE flags passed to the package compile (mojo precompile).
flags	list[str]	[]	Extra flags appended to every package-compile invocation.
source-include	list[str]	(sensible default)	Glob patterns of files to include in the sdist.
source-exclude	list[str]	[]	Glob patterns to exclude from the sdist.
wheel-exclude	list[str]	[]	Glob patterns to exclude from the wheel.

What you get

• Platform-tagged wheels. The compiled package is native code, so wheels are tagged with the host platform (e.g. manylinux_2_34_x86_64, macosx_13_0_arm64). Cross-platform installs are correctly rejected by uv/pip.
• Native lib bundling. Drop .so / .dylib paths in native-libs; they ride along in mojo_packages/lib/, where mojox's runtime adds them to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.
• PEP 660 editable installs. uv pip install -e . works. For rebuild-on-change semantics, add cache-keys = [{ file = "pyproject.toml" }, { file = "**/*.mojo" }] to [tool.uv].
• Reproducible builds. ZIP and tar timestamps respect SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH.
• Parallel compilation. Multi-package repos compile their packages in parallel (capped at 8 workers).
• Preflight checks. Missing mojo, missing dirs, missing native libs, dynamic-version configs → one clean error message, not a stderr dump.
• Full PEP 621 / PEP 639 metadata. authors, maintainers, urls, keywords, classifiers, optional-dependencies, license-files (copied into .dist-info/licenses/) all flow into the wheel METADATA.
• --config-setting verbose=true. Streams compiler output during builds when you need to debug.

How it works (architecture in five lines)

__init__.py re-exports the hook surface. _hooks is thin glue that calls into _config (parse pyproject), _preflight (environment checks), _build (compile + assemble), and _metadata (METADATA/WHEEL rendering). The whole backend has only one runtime dep beyond the stdlib: packaging for platform tags.

Limitations / known gaps

• Dynamic project.version is not supported. Declare it statically.
• Editable installs rebuild the full wheel on every invocation; there's no source-import fast path because the package is compiled bytecode.
• Cross-compilation (--target per platform) is not exposed yet. Today's wheels are host-platform only.