Troubleshooting¶

If your wheel didn't compile, check the list below for some debugging tips.

• A mistake in your config. To quickly test your config without doing a git push and waiting for your code to build on CI, you can test the Linux build in a Docker container. On Mac or Linux, with Docker running, try cibuildwheel --platform linux. You'll have to bring your config into the current environment first.

• Missing dependency. You might need to install something on the build machine. You can do this in .travis.yml, appveyor.yml, or .circleci/config.yml, with apt-get, brew or choco. Given how the Linux build works, you'll need to use the CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD option.

• Windows: missing C feature. The Windows C compiler doesn't support C language features invented after 1990, so you'll have to backport your C code to C90. For me, this mostly involved putting my variable declarations at the top of the function like an animal.

• MacOS: calling cibuildwheel from a python3 script and getting a ModuleNotFoundError? Due to a (fixed) bug in CPython, you'll need to unset the __PYVENV_LAUNCHER__ variable before activating a venv.

Linux builds on Docker¶

Linux wheels are built in the manylinux docker images to provide binary compatible wheels on Linux, according to PEP 571. Because of this, when building with cibuildwheel on Linux, a few things should be taken into account:

• Programs and libraries are not installed on the Travis CI Ubuntu host, but rather should be installed inside of the Docker image (using yum for manylinux2010 or manylinux2014, and apt-get for manylinux_2_24) or manually. The same goes for environment variables that are potentially needed to customize the wheel building. cibuildwheel supports this by providing the CIBW_ENVIRONMENT and CIBW_BEFORE_BUILD options to setup the build environment inside the running Docker image. See the options docs for details on these options.

• The project directory is mounted in the running Docker instance as /project, the output directory for the wheels as /output. In general, this is handled transparently by cibuildwheel. For a more finegrained level of control however, the root of the host file system is mounted as /host, allowing for example to access shared files, caches, etc. on the host file system. Note that this is not available on CircleCI due to their Docker policies.

• Alternative dockers images can be specified with the CIBW_MANYLINUX_X86_64_IMAGE, CIBW_MANYLINUX_I686_IMAGE, and CIBW_MANYLINUX_PYPY_X86_64_IMAGE options to allow for a custom, preconfigured build environment for the Linux builds. See options for more details.

Building macOS wheels for Apple Silicon¶

cibuildwheel supports cross-compiling universal2 and arm64 wheels on x86_64 runners. With the introduction of Apple Silicon, you now have several choices for wheels for Python 3.9+:

x86_64¶

The traditional wheel for Apple, loads on Intel machines, and on Apple Silicon when running Python under Rosetta 2 emulation.

Due to a change in naming, Pip 20.3+ (or an installer using packaging 20.5+) is required to install a binary wheel on macOS Big Sur.

arm64¶

The native wheel for macOS on Apple Silicon.

Requires Pip 20.3+ (or packaging 20.5+) to install.

universal2¶

This wheel contains both architectures, causing it to be up to twice the size (data files do not get doubled, only compiled code). It requires Pip 20.3 (Packaging 20.6+) to load on Intel, and Pip 21.0.1 (Packaging 20.9+) to load on Apple Silicon.

Generally speaking, because Pip 20.3 is required for the universal2 wheel, most packages should provide both x86_64 and universal2 wheels for now. Once Pip 20.3+ is common on macOS, then it should be possible to ship only the universal2 wheel.

Apple Silicon wheels are not built by default, but can be enabled by adding extra archs to the CIBW_ARCHS_MACOS option - e.g. x86_64 arm64 universal2. Cross-compilation is provided by the Xcode toolchain.

Hopefully, cross-compilation is a temporary situation. Once we have widely available Apple Silicon CI runners, we can build and test arm64 and universal2 wheels natively. That's why universal2 wheels are not yet built by default, and require opt-in by setting CIBW_ARCHS_MACOS.

Here's an example GitHub Actions workflow with a job that builds for Apple Silicon:

.github/workflows/build_macos.yml

name: Build

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build_wheels_macos:
    name: Build wheels on macos-10.15
    runs-on: macos-10.15
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Build wheels
        uses: pypa/cibuildwheel@v1.12.0
        env:
          CIBW_ARCHS_MACOS: x86_64 universal2

      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: ./wheelhouse/*.whl

Building non-native architectures using emulation¶

cibuildwheel supports building non-native architectures on Linux, via emulation through the binfmt_misc kernel feature. The easiest way to use this is via the docker/setup-qemu-action on GitHub Actions or tonistiigi/binfmt.

Check out the following config for an example of how to set it up on GitHub Actions. Once QEMU is set up and registered, you just need to set the CIBW_ARCHS_LINUX environment variable (or use the --archs option on Linux), and the other architectures are emulated automatically.

.github/workflows/build.yml

name: Build

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build_wheels:
    name: Build wheels on ${{ matrix.os }}
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [ubuntu-20.04, windows-2019, macos-10.15]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - uses: actions/setup-python@v2
        name: Install Python
        with:
          python-version: '3.7'

      - name: Set up QEMU
        if: runner.os == 'Linux'
        uses: docker/setup-qemu-action@v1
        with:
          platforms: all

      - name: Build wheels
        uses: pypa/cibuildwheel@v1.12.0
        env:
          # configure cibuildwheel to build native archs ('auto'), and some
          # emulated ones
          CIBW_ARCHS_LINUX: auto aarch64 ppc64le s390x

      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: ./wheelhouse/*.whl

Building Apple Silicon wheels on Intel¶

cibuildwheel supports cross-compiling universal2 and arm64 wheels on x86_64 runners.

These wheels are not built by default, but can be enabled by setting the CIBW_ARCHS_MACOS option to x86_64 arm64 universal2. Cross-compilation is provided by the Xcode toolchain.

Hopefully, this is a temporary situation. Once we have widely available Apple Silicon CI runners, we can build and test arm64 and universal2 wheels more natively. That's why universal2 wheels are not yet built by default, and require opt-in by setting CIBW_ARCHS_MACOS.

Here's an example GitHub Actions workflow with a job that builds for Apple Silicon:

.github/workflows/build_macos.yml

name: Build

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build_wheels_macos:
    name: Build wheels on macos-10.15
    runs-on: macos-10.15
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Build wheels
        uses: pypa/cibuildwheel@v1.12.0
        env:
          CIBW_ARCHS_MACOS: x86_64 universal2

      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
        with:
          path: ./wheelhouse/*.whl

Windows and Python 2.7¶

Building 2.7 extensions on Windows is difficult, because the VS 2008 compiler that was used for the original Python compilation was discontinued in 2018, and has since been removed from Microsoft's downloads. Most people choose to not build Windows 2.7 wheels, or to override the compiler to something more modern.

To override, you need to have a modern compiler toolchain activated, and set DISTUTILS_USE_SDK=1 and MSSdk=1. For example, on GitHub Actions, you would add these steps:

    - name: Prepare compiler environment for Windows
      if: runner.os == 'Windows'
      uses: ilammy/msvc-dev-cmd@v1
      with:
        arch: x64

    - name: Set Windows environment variables
      if: runner.os == 'Windows'
      shell: bash
      run: |
        echo "DISTUTILS_USE_SDK=1" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "MSSdk=1" >> $GITHUB_ENV

    # invoke cibuildwheel...

cibuildwheel will not try to build 2.7 on Windows unless it detects that the above two variables are set. Note that changing to a more modern compiler will mean your wheel picks up a runtime dependency to a different Visual C++ Redistributable. You also need to be a bit careful in designing your extension; some major binding tools like pybind11 do this for you.

More on setting a custom Windows toolchain in our docs on modern C++ standards here.

Building packages with optional C extensions¶

cibuildwheel defines the environment variable CIBUILDWHEEL to the value 1 allowing projects for which the C extension is optional to make it mandatory when building wheels.

An easy way to do it in Python 3 is through the optional named argument of Extension constructor in your setup.py:

myextension = Extension(
    "myextension",
    ["myextension.c"],
    optional=os.environ.get('CIBUILDWHEEL', '0') != '1',
)

'No module named XYZ' errors after running cibuildwheel on macOS¶

cibuildwheel on Mac installs the distributions from Python.org system-wide during its operation. This is necessary, but it can cause some confusing errors after cibuildwheel has finished.

Consider the build script:

python3 -m pip install twine cibuildwheel
python3 -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse
python3 -m twine upload wheelhouse/*.whl
# error: no module named 'twine'

This doesn't work because while cibuildwheel was running, it installed a few new versions of 'python3', so the python3 run on line 3 isn't the same as the python3 that ran on line 1.

Solutions to this vary, but the simplest is to install tools immediately before they're used:

python3 -m pip install cibuildwheel
python3 -m cibuildwheel --output-dir wheelhouse
python3 -m pip install twine
python3 -m twine upload wheelhouse/*.whl

'ImportError: DLL load failed: The specific module could not be found' error on Windows¶

Visual Studio and MSVC link the compiled binary wheels to the Microsoft Visual C++ Runtime. Normally, these are included with Python, but when compiling with a newer version of Visual Studio, it is possible users will run into problems on systems that do not have these runtime libraries installed. The solution is to ask users to download the corresponding Visual C++ Redistributable from the Microsoft website and install it. Since a Python installation normally includes these VC++ Redistributable files for the version of the MSVC compiler used to compile Python, this is typically only a problem when compiling a Python 2.7 C extension with a newer compiler, e.g. to support a modern C++ standard (see the section on modern C++ standards for Python 2.7 for more details).

Additionally, Visual Studio 2019 started linking to an even newer DLL, VCRUNTIME140_1.dll, besides the VCRUNTIME140.dll that is included with recent Python versions (starting from Python 3.5; see here for more details on the corresponding Visual Studio & MSVC versions used to compile the different Python versions). To avoid this extra dependency on VCRUNTIME140_1.dll, the /d2FH4- flag can be added to the MSVC invocations (check out this issue for details and references).

To add the /d2FH4- flag to a standard setup.py using setuptools, the extra_compile_args option can be used:

    ext_modules=[
        Extension(
            'c_module',
            sources=['extension.c'],
            extra_compile_args=['/d2FH4-'] if sys.platform == 'win32' else []
        )
    ],

To investigate the dependencies of a C extension (i.e., the .pyd file, a DLL in disguise) on Windows, Dependency Walker is a great tool.

Automatic updates¶

Selecting a moving target (like the latest release) is generally a bad idea in CI. If something breaks, you can't tell whether it was your code or an upstream update that caused the breakage, and in a worse-case scenario, it could occur during a release. There are two suggested methods for keeping cibuildwheel up to date that instead involve scheduled pull requests using GitHub's dependabot.

Option 1: GitHub Action¶

If you use GitHub Actions for builds, you can use cibuildwheel as an action:

uses: pypa/cibuildwheel@v1.12.0

This is a composite step that just runs cibuildwheel using pipx. You can set command-line options as with: parameters, and use env: as normal.

Then, your dependabot.yml file could look like this:

version: 2
updates:
  - package-ecosystem: "github-actions"
    directory: "/"
    schedule:
      interval: "weekly"
    ignore:
      # Optional: Official actions have moving tags like v1;
      # if you use those, you don't need updates.
      - dependency-name: "actions/*"

Option 2: Requirement files¶

The second option, and the only one that supports other CI systems, is using a requirements-*.txt file. The file should have a distinct name and have only one entry:

# requirements-cibw.txt
cibuildwheel==1.12.0

Then your install step would have python -m pip install -r requirements-cibw.txt in it. Your dependabot.yml file could look like this:

version: 2
updates:
  - package-ecosystem: "pip"
    directory: "/"
    schedule:
      interval: "daily"

This will also try to update other pins in all requirement files, so be sure you want to do that. The only control you have over the files used is via the directory option.