Wheelwright

This repo builds release wheels for Python libraries available as GitHub repositories. We're currently using it to build wheels for spaCy and our other libraries. The build repository integrates with Travis CI and Appveyor and builds wheels for macOS, Linux and Windows. All wheels are available in the releases.

🙏 Special thanks to Nathaniel J. Smith for helping us out with this, to Matthew Brett for multibuild, and of course to the PyPA team for their hard work on Python packaging.

⚠ This repo is still experimental and currently mostly intended to build wheels for our projects. But we're hoping that it will become stable soon, so it can be adopted by other projects as well. For more details on how it works, check out the FAQ below.

Usage Guide

Quickstart

1. Fork or clone this repo and run pip install -r requirements.txt to install its requirements.

2. Generate a personal GitHub token with access to the "repo" scope and put it in a file github-secret-token.txt in the root of the repo.

3. Update the .travis.yml with the encrypted GitHub token using the Travis CI command-line tool.

4. Update the appveyor.yml with the encrypted GitHub token using Appveyor's online tool.

5. Commit the changes. Don't worry, the secrets file is excluded in the .gitignore.

6. Manually disable Appveyor builds for pull requests by unchecking the box labeled "Pull requests" in the "Webhooks" section of the build repository on GitHub.

7. Run python run.py build your-org/your-repo [commit/tag].

8. Wait for the build to complete and check the /wheels directory for the wheels.

Setup and Installation

Make a local clone of this repo:

git clone https://github.com/explosion/wheelwright

Next, install its requirements (ideally in a virtual environment):

pip install -r requirements.txt

Click here to generate a personal Github token. Give it some memorable description, and check the box to give it the "repo" scope. This will give you some gibberish like:

f7d4d475c85ba2ae9557391279d1fc2368f95c38

Security notes

• Be careful with this gibberish; anyone who gets it can impersonate you to Github.

• If you're ever worried that your token has been compromised, you can delete it here, and then generate a new one.

• This token is only used to access the wheelwright repository, so if you want to be extra-careful you could create a new Github user, grant them access to this repo only, and then use a token generated with that user's account.

Next go into your wheelwright checkout, and create a file called github-secret-token.txt. Write the gibberish into this file:

cd wheelwright
my-editor github-secret-token.txt
cat github-secret-token.txt
f7d4d475c85ba2ae9557391279d1fc2368f95c38

Don't worry, github-secret-token.txt is listed in .gitignore, so it's difficult to accidentally commit it. Instead of adding the file, you can also provide the token via the GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN environment variable.

Secrets and CI configuration

To upload the wheels, the CI builds need access to a Github token that has write permissions on this repository. Specifically, they need a token with repo access to this repo, and expect to find it in an envvar named GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN. To do this, we use Appveyor's and Travis's support for encrypted environment variables.

Appveyor

First, create your Github token (as in the "setup" section above). Then, for Appveyor:

• Log in as whichever Appveyor user initially enabled Appveyor for the build repo.
• Go to https://ci.appveyor.com/tools/encrypt
• Paste in the token (just the token, do not include the GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN= part).
• Copy the "Encrypted value" it gives you back into appveyor.yml.

Travis

And for Travis, we need to get a copy of the travis program, and run travis encrypt GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN=<...> (notice that here you do have to include the GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN= in the encrypted text). On Ubuntu, I was able to get it working by doing:

sudo apt install ruby-dev
gem install --user-install travis
~/.gem/ruby/*/bin/travis encrypt GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN=f7d4d475c85ba2ae9557391279d1fc2368f95c38

Then copy the gibberish it gives you into .travis.yml.

Disabling pull request builds

Travis and Appveyor are both configured to not build tags (because we don't want our Github releases to trigger builds), and to only build branches matching the pattern branch-for-* (because we don't want commits to master to trigger builds). This is all done through the .yml files.

On Travis, we can also use the .yml to disable building of PRs, and so we do. On Appveyor, though this, isn't possible! In fact, Appveyor simply doesn't provide any way to disable PR builds in general. But, there is a hack: if we stop Github from telling Appveyor about PRs, then it can't build them.

Therefore, after setting up Appveyor, we go the Github settings for our repository, in the "Webhooks" section, click "Edit" on the Appveyor webhook, uncheck the box labeled "Pull requests", and then click "Update webhook" to save our settings.

Building a wheel

If you want to build wheels for the v1.31.2 tag inside the explosion/cymem repository, then run:

cd wheelwright
python run.py build explosion/cymem v1.31.2

Eventually, if everything goes well, you'll end up with wheels in a directory named wheels/cymem-v1.31.2:

$ ls wheels/cymem-v1.31.2
cymem-1.32.1-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_i686.whl
cymem-1.32.1-cp27-cp27mu-manylinux1_x86_64.whl
... and so on ...

Now you can upload them to PyPI:

twine upload wheels/cymem-v1.31.2/*.whl

This only uploads wheels. Don't forget to also upload an sdist!

API

run.py check

Verify that everything is set up correctly.

python run.py check

┬ ┬┬ ┬┌─┐┌─┐┬  ┬ ┬┬─┐┬┌─┐┬ ┬┌┬┐
│││├─┤├┤ ├┤ │  │││├┬┘││ ┬├─┤ │
└┴┘┴ ┴└─┘└─┘┴─┘└┴┘┴└─┴└─┘┴ ┴ ┴

Checking if things are set up correctly...

✓ Using build repo explosion/wheelwright
✓ Found GitHub secret in github-secret-token.txt file.
✓ Connected to GitHub with token for user @explosion-bot
✓ Checked GitHub rate limiting: 4982/5000 remaining
✓ .travis.yml exists in root directory.
✓ appveyor.yml exists in root directory.

run.py build

Build wheels for a given repo and commit / tag.

python run.py build explosion/cymem v1.32.1

Argument	Type	Description
repo	positional	The repository to build, in user/repo format.
commit	positional	The commit to build.
--package-name	option	Optional alternative Python package name, if different from repo name.

run.py download

Download existing wheels for a release ID (name of build repo tag). The downloaded wheels will be placed in a directory wheels.

python run.py download cymem-v1.31.2

Argument	Type	Description
release-id	positional	Name of the release to download.

Environment variables

Name	Description	Default
WHEELWRIGHT_ROOT	Root directory of the build repo	Same directory as run.py
WHEELWRIGHT_WHEELS_DIR	Directory for downloaded wheels	/wheels in root directory
WHEELWRIGHT_REPO	Build repository in user/repo format	Automatically read from git config
GITHUB_SECRET_TOKEN	Personal GitHub access token, if not provided via github-secret-token.txt	-

FAQ

What does this actually do?

The build command uses the Github API to create a Github release in this repo, called something like cymem-v1.31.2. Don't be confused: this is not a real release! We're just abusing Github releases to have a temporary place to collect the wheel files as we build them.

Then it creates a new branch of this repo, and in the branch it creates a file called build-spec.json describing which project and commit you want to build.

When Travis and Appveyor see this branch, they spring into action, and start build jobs running on a variety of architectures and Python versions. These build jobs read the build-spec.json file, and then check out the specified project/revision, build it, test it, and finally attach the resulting wheel to the Github release we created earlier.

The build command waits until Travis and Appveyor have finished. If they succeed, it downloads all the wheels from the Github release into a local directory, ready for uploading to PyPI.

What if something goes wrong?

If the build fails, the script will say so, and won't download any wheels. While it runs it prints links to the Travis/Appveyor build logs, the release object, etc., which you can use to get more details about what went wrong.

If for some reason you want to download the wheels from an existing release, you can do that with:

python run.py download cymem-v1.31.2

This might be useful if you accidentally killed a build command before it finished, or if you want to get partial results from a failed build.

If you resubmit a build, then run.py will notice and give it a unique build id – so if you run run.py build explosion/cymem v1.31.2 twice, the first time it'll use the id cymem-v1.31.2, and the second time it will be cymem-v1.31.2-2, etc. This doesn't affect the generated wheels in any way; it's just to make sure we don't get mixed up between the two builds.

As a package maintainer, what do I need to know about the build process?

Essentially we run:

# Setup
$ git clone https://github.com/USER-NAME/PROJECT-NAME.git checkout
$ cd checkout
$ git checkout REVISION

# Build
$ cd checkout
$ pip install -Ur requirements.txt
$ python setup.py bdist_wheel

# Test
$ cd empty-directory
$ pip install -Ur ../checkout/requirements.txt
$ pip install THE-BUILT-WHEEL
$ pytest --pyargs PROJECT-NAME

Some things to note:

The build/test phases currently have varying levels of isolation from each other:

• On Windows, they use the same Python environment.
• On macOS, they use different virtualenvs.
• On Linux, they run in different docker containers, which are running different Linux distros, to make sure the binaries really are portable.

We use the same requirements.txt for both building and testing. You could imagine splitting those into two separate files, in order to make sure that dependency resolution is working, that we don't have any run-time dependency on Cython, etc., but currently we don't. If doing this then it would also make sense to be more careful about splitting up the build/test environments, and about separating the run.py helper script from the build/test environments.

We assume that projects use pytest for testing, and that they ship their tests inside their main package, so that you can run the tests directly from an installed wheel without access to a source checkout.

For simplicity, we assume that the repository name (in the clone URL) is the same as the Python import name (in the pytest command). You can override this on a case-by-case basis passing --package ... to the build command, but of course doing this every time is going to be annoying.

Aside from modifying setup.py, there isn't currently any way for a specific project to further customize the build, e.g. if they need to build some dependency like libblis that's not available on PyPI.

What do I need to know to maintain this repo itself?

Internally, this builds on Matthew Brett's multibuild project. A snapshot of multibuild is included as a git submodule, in the multibuild/ directory. You might want to update that submodule occasionally to pull in new multibuild fixes:

cd multibuild
git pull
cd ..
git commit -am "Updated multibuild snapshot

Multibuild was originally designed to do Linux and macOS builds, and with the idea that you'd create a separate repo for each project with custom configuration. We kluge it into working for us by reading configuration out of the build-spec.json file and using it to configure various settings. On Windows we use Multibuild's install_python script, both otherwise the Windows code is all custom.

Most of the actual configuration is in the .travis.yml and appveyor.yml files. These use the run.py script to perform various actions, ranging from parsing the build-spec.json file, to uploading wheels, to (on Windows) coordinating the whole build/test process.

Unfortunately, there are currently no automated tests. Sorry 😞 They would need Github permissions and all kinds of things.

I'm not Explosion AI, but I want to use this too!

It's all under the MIT license, so feel free! It would be great to somehow convert this into a generic reusable piece of infrastructure, though it's not entirely clear how given how Rube-Goldergian the whole thing is – you can't just slap it up on PyPI. (Maybe a cookiecutter template that generates a repo like this?)