Building binary wheels

Several packages in the Zope Foundation repositories contain C code, which means they should be packaged and published as binary wheels. Building such binary wheels has its pitfalls, though. If not done right they can cause application instability and crashes.

Warning

Publishing binary wheels built in a local build environment is highly discouraged! Every build environment is different, binary wheels made for publication on PyPI should only be built in standardized and predictable environments.

To minimize problems we have automated binary wheel building using GitHub Actions. Wheels are built and uploaded using a special PyPI account named zope.wheelbuilder. These configurations and the PyPI account are currently maintained by Marius Gedminas, Michael Howitz and Jens Vagelpohl. You can contact them by posting your question or bug report in the meta repository issue tracker. Here is a short description of the process, please note that some steps can only be performed by the configuration maintainers:

Prerequisites

• Every project publishing binary wheels must add the PyPI account zope.wheelbuilder to the list of project maintainers on PyPI.

• Log into the zope.wheelbuilder account and create an API token for the project on the “Account settings” page with upload permissions and the project name as scope. Copy the token value - this is the only time you can.

Using GitHub Actions

• On your project GitHub page go to “Settings” and then click on “Secrets” on the left-hand menu. Create a new repository secret and call it TWINE_PASSWORD. Paste the API token value you created for the zope.wheelbuilder PyPI account.

• Take a look at a complete GitHub Actions test and wheel building configuration for inspiration, or if you already use the standardized parameterized project configuration simply build your configuration from the template named c-code.