whl 0.0.4

Minimalist wheel building

Quickly makes Python wheels from a bunch of .py files without needing a setup.py at all.

You probably don’t want to use this. It’s intentionally minimal for my own use-cases, and doesn’t have many features yet (no support for entrypoints, dependencies, extras). If all you’re looking for is a fast build, then consider using flit build --format wheel with a pyproject.toml, this should be nearly as fast.

Usage

For a single file distribution:

python whl.py path/to/myfile.py

For a package (directory with an __init__.py file in it):

python whl.py path/to/dir

whl.py will look in some sensible places to autodetect the package name/version.

Rationale

If all you want to do is package some .py file(s) into a .whl, that’s essentially just making a zipfile. Executing a setuptools / distutils style installer script or a PEP517 / PEP518 style build system is bloated with features which you don’t need, and it can be done much cheaper/faster:

$ time python whl.py mypkg
./mypkg-0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
python whl.py mypkg  0.06s user 0.02s system 86% cpu 0.091 total

Compared with doing things the correct way:

$ time python -m build --wheel .
* Creating venv isolated environment...
...
<blah blah>
...
Successfully built mypkg-0.1-py2.py3-none-any.whl
python -m build --wheel .  5.05s user 0.53s system 96% cpu 5.776 total