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, 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	manylinuxmusllinux x86_64	manylinuxmusllinux i686	manylinuxmusllinux aarch64	manylinuxmusllinux ppc64le	manylinuxmusllinux s390x	manylinuxmusllinux 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

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==4.3.5

      - 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.

[!WARNING] Building and testing wheels executes arbitrary code from your project and its dependencies. Although cibuildwheel uses OCI containers and Pyodide for some builds, these provide no security guarantees - the code you're building and testing has full access to the environment that's invoking cibuildwheel.

If you cannot trust all the code that's pulled in, maintain good security hygiene: keep the job that builds distributions separate from the job that uploads them to PyPI, handle secrets and credentials with care and rotate them regularly, and follow the principle of least privilege when granting permissions. Do not store sensitive data on CI runners.

	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

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

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

v4.3.5

27 October 2026

• 🐛 Stops passing the target build environment to the host virtualenv call, regression in v4.3.4 (#3023)
• 🛠 Updates dependencies and constraints (pyodide-build 0.39.3, CPython 3.15.2, etc) (#3024, #3027)
• 💼 Updates CI actions (#3025)

v4.3.4

22 October 2026

• 🔐 Warns when a uv build frontend is selected and the host uv is older than 0.13.4, which still trusts the compromised eMudhra CA roots (#3021)
• 🔐 Uses cibuildwheel's CA bundle for pip on Python 3.9, where pip uses its bundled certifi, which still trusts the compromised eMudhra roots (#3017)
• 🔐 Uses cibuildwheel's CA bundle for pip on GraalPy, where truststore is not supported (#3019)
• 🔐 Uses cibuildwheel's CA bundle in Android, iOS, and Pyodide cross venvs, where pip uses the host's OpenSSL CA file (#3020)
• 🐛 Seeds build's isolated environment with the pinned pip on macOS and Windows, fixing GraalPy 25.0 builds (#3018)
• 💼 Stops Azure cache growth from restoreKeys (#3022)

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)

---

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.