👩🏻💻 GitHub Actions workflow: .github/workflows/wheels.yml
This repo shows how to build binary wheels for the Python grpcio library, for the Apple Silicon architecture.
Currently (version 1.48.1), grpcio provides compiled binary wheels only for Intel Macs, not for Apple Silicon machines.
- 👉 check on PyPI if the situation changed!
Google Cloud's client libraries for Python depend on grpcio, and without a binary release of grpcio it becomes hard to install them on a local development environment.
😰 Not having a binary wheel for grpcio severely impairs the developer experience of M1/M2 Mac users: when they do pip install grpcio, pip downloads for them the source tarball and attempts to compile the library.
Compiling grpcio on Mac is slow, and notoriously hard and, in my experience, users become frustrated after the 10th attempt with some combination of environment variables, dependencies, and compilation flags (brew install random stuff, LDFLAGS, CFLAGS, GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL, ...). A downloadable binary wheel would enable a much more pleasant user experience.
In this issue, I proposed a way to cross-compile grpcio from an Intel-based CI runner, using the amazing cibuildwheel tool.
This repo contains another example, that uses GitHub Actions.