How to create a Pure-Python wheel

Question

From the following setup.py file, I am trying to create a pure-python wheel from a project that should contain only python 2.7 code.

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='foo',
    version='0.0.1',
    description='',
    url='',
    install_requires=[
        'bpython',
        'Django==1.8.2',
    ],
)

However, when I run python setup.py bdist_wheel the wheel file that is generated is platform specific foo-0.0.1-cp27-none-macosx_10_9_x86_64.whl wheel file instead of the expected foo-0.0.1-cp27-none-any.whl. When I try to install this wheel on a different platform it fails saying it is not compatible with this Python.

I there something I need to change about the setup.py file or python interpreter, perhaps, that will allow this wheel to be used on any platform?

score 10 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 31 '16 at 09:26

The simplistic way is to add --universal to your commandline, as you can see from running python setup.py bdist_wheel --help:

  --universal       make a universal wheel (default: false)

Alternatively you can add a setup.cfg file next to your setup.py that takes care of this:

[bdist_wheel]
universal = 1

If you don't like yet another configuration file clobbering your package, you can just write such a file in your setup.py just before it calls setup() and then remove it after that call returns, this is what I do in the shared setup.py for all my projects on PyPI e.g. used in ruamel.yaml.

The question is not asking how to make a universal wheel. – wim Nov 16 '21 at 18:37 — wim, Nov 16 '21 at 18:37

wim · Answer 2 · 2021-11-16T18:59:35.433

This part of the filename is controlled by the bdist_wheel option called python tag:

python2 setup.py bdist_wheel --help | grep python-tag
  --python-tag      Python implementation compatibility tag (default: 'py2')

However the default is generally 'py2' (or 'py3' for a python3 runtime), so to get a platform-specific wheel you must have something else in your configuration that is not shown in the question.

Regardless, you can specify the tag explicitly in your setup file:

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name="foo",
    version="0.0.1",
    ...
    options={"bdist_wheel": {"python_tag": "cp27"}},
)

This configuration will create a wheel named foo-0.0.1-cp27-none-any.whl.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 01 '16 at 20:02

Adding the classifiers field to my setup.py fixed this issue.

from setuptools import setup

setup(
    name='foo',
    version='0.0.1',
    description='',
    url='',
    classifiers=[
        'Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7',
    ],
    install_requires=[
        'bpython',
        'Django==1.8.2',
    ],
)

How to create a Pure-Python wheel

3 Answers3

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