manylinux

Email: wheel-builders@python.org

Archives: https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/wheel-builders

Older archives: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/manylinux-discuss

The goal of the manylinux project is to provide a convenient way to distribute binary Python extensions as wheels on Linux. This effort has produced PEP 513 which defines the manylinux1_x86_64 and manylinux1_i686 platform tags.

Wheel packages compliant with those tags can be uploaded to PyPI (for instance with twine) and can be installed with pip 8.1 and later.

The manylinux1 tags allow projects to distribute wheels that are automatically installed (and work!) on the vast majority of desktop and server Linux distributions.

This repository hosts several manylinux-related things:

Docker images

Building manylinux-compatible wheels is not trivial; as a general rule, binaries built on one Linux distro will only work on other Linux distros that are the same age or newer. Therefore, if we want to make binaries that run on most Linux distros, we have to use a very old distro -- CentOS 5.

Rather than forcing you to install CentOS 5 yourself, install Python, etc., we provide two Docker images where we've done the work for you:

64-bit image (x86-64): quay.io/pypa/manylinux1_x86_64

32-bit image (i686): quay.io/pypa/manylinux1_i686

This images are rebuilt using Travis-CI on every commit to this repository; see the docker/ directory for source code.

The images currently contain:

• CPython 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, and 3.5, installed in /opt/python/<python tag>-<abi tag>. The directories are named after the PEP 425 tags for each environment -- e.g. /opt/python/cp27-cp27mu contains a wide-unicode CPython 2.7 build, and can be used to produce wheels named like <pkg>-<version>-cp27-cp27mu-<arch>.whl.
• Devel packages for all the libraries that PEP 513 allows you to assume are present on the host system
• The auditwheel tool

Note that prior to CPython 3.3, there were two ABI-incompatible ways of building CPython: --enable-unicode=ucs2 and --enable-unicode=ucs4. We provide both versions (e.g. /opt/python/cp27-cp27m for narrow-unicode, /opt/python/cp27-cp27mu for wide-unicode). NB: essentially all Linux distributions configure CPython in mu (--enable-unicode=ucs4) mode, but --enable-unicode=ucs2 builds are also encountered in the wild. Other less common or virtually unheard of flag combinations (such as --with-pydebug (d) and --without-pymalloc (absence of m)) are not provided.

It'd be good to put an example of how to use these images here, but that isn't written yet. If you want to know, then bug us on the mailing list to fill in this section :-). However, one useful tip is that a list of all interpreters can be obtained with /opt/python/*/bin/python.

The PEP itself

The official version of PEP 513 is stored in the PEP repository, but we also have our own copy here. This is where the PEP was originally written, so if for some reason you really want to see the full history of edits it went through, then this is the place to look.

This repo also has some analysis code that was used when putting together the original proposal in the policy-info/ directory (might be useful someday in the future for writing a manylinux2 policy).

If you want to read the full discussion that led to the original policy, then lots of that is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/manylinux-discuss

The distutils-sig archives for January 2016 also contain several threads.

Code of Conduct

Everyone interacting in the manylinux project's codebases, issue trackers, chat rooms, and mailing lists is expected to follow the PyPA Code of Conduct.