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Wheel
A built-package format for Python.
A wheel is a ZIP-format archive with a specially formatted filename
and the .whl extension. It is designed to contain all the files for a
PEP 376 compatible install in a way that is very close to the on-disk
format. Many packages will be properly installed with only the "Unpack"
step (simply extracting the file onto sys.path), and the unpacked archive
preserves enough information to "Spread" (copy data and scripts to their
final locations) at any later time.
The wheel project provides a bdist_wheel command for setuptools
(requires setuptools >= 0.8.0). Wheel files can be installed with a
newer pip from https://github.com/pypa/pip or with wheel's own command
line utility.
The wheel documentation is at http://wheel.rtfd.org/. The file format
is documented in PEP 427 (http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0427/).
The reference implementation is at https://bitbucket.org/pypa/wheel

Why not egg?
Python's egg format predates the packaging related standards we have
today, the most important being PEP 376 "Database of Installed Python
Distributions" which specifies the .dist-info directory (instead of
.egg-info) and PEP 426 "Metadata for Python Software Packages 2.0"
which specifies how to express dependencies (instead of requires.txt
in .egg-info).
Wheel implements these things. It also provides a richer file naming
convention that communicates the Python implementation and ABI as well
as simply the language version used in a particular package.
Unlike .egg, wheel will be a fully-documented standard at the binary
level that is truly easy to install even if you do not want to use the
reference implementation.

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

0.29.0

Fix compression type of files in archive (Issue #155, Pull Request #62,
thanks Xavier Fernandez)


0.28.0

Fix file modes in archive (Issue #154)


0.27.0

Support forcing a platform tag using --plat-name on pure-Python wheels, as
well as nonstandard platform tags on non-pure wheels (Pull Request #60, Issue
#144, thanks Andrés Díaz)
Add SOABI tags to platform-specific wheels built for Python 2.X (Pull Request
#55, Issue #63, Issue #101)
Support reproducible wheel files, wheels that can be rebuilt and will hash to
the same values as previous builds (Pull Request #52, Issue #143, thanks
Barry Warsaw)
Support for changes in keyring >= 8.0 (Pull Request #61, thanks Jason R.
Coombs)
Use the file context manager when checking if dependency_links.txt is empty,
fixes problems building wheels under PyPy on Windows  (Issue #150, thanks
Cosimo Lupo)
Don't attempt to (recursively) create a build directory ending with ..
(invalid on all platforms, but code was only executed on Windows) (Issue #91)
Added the PyPA Code of Conduct (Pull Request #56)


0.26.0

Fix multiple entrypoint comparison failure on Python 3 (Issue #148)


0.25.0

Add Python 3.5 to tox configuration
Deterministic (sorted) metadata
Fix tagging for Python 3.5 compatibility
Support py2-none-'arch' and py3-none-'arch' tags
Treat data-only wheels as pure
Write to temporary file and rename when using wheel install --force


0.24.0

The python tag used for pure-python packages is now .pyN (major version
only). This change actually occurred in 0.23.0 when the --python-tag
option was added, but was not explicitly mentioned in the changelog then.
wininst2wheel and egg2wheel removed. Use "wheel convert [archive]"
instead.
Wheel now supports setuptools style conditional requirements via the
extras_require={} syntax. Separate 'extra' names from conditions using
the : character. Wheel's own setup.py does this. (The empty-string
extra is the same as install_requires.) These conditional requirements
should work the same whether the package is installed by wheel or
by setup.py.


0.23.0

Compatibility tag flags added to the bdist_wheel command
sdist should include files necessary for tests
'wheel convert' can now also convert unpacked eggs to wheel
Rename pydist.json to metadata.json to avoid stepping on the PEP
The --skip-scripts option has been removed, and not generating scripts is now
the default. The option was a temporary approach until installers could
generate scripts themselves. That is now the case with pip 1.5 and later.
Note that using pip 1.4 to install a wheel without scripts will leave the
installation without entry-point wrappers. The "wheel install-scripts"
command can be used to generate the scripts in such cases.
Thank you contributors


0.22.0

Include entry_points.txt, scripts a.k.a. commands, in experimental
pydist.json
Improved test_requires parsing
Python 2.6 fixes, "wheel version" command courtesy pombredanne


0.21.0

Pregenerated scripts are the default again.
"setup.py bdist_wheel --skip-scripts" turns them off.
setuptools is no longer a listed requirement for the 'wheel'
package. It is of course still required in order for bdist_wheel
to work.
"python -m wheel" avoids importing pkg_resources until it's necessary.


0.20.0

No longer include console_scripts in wheels. Ordinary scripts (shell files,
standalone Python files) are included as usual.
Include new command "python -m wheel install-scripts [distribution
[distribution ...]]" to install the console_scripts (setuptools-style
scripts using pkg_resources) for a distribution.


0.19.0

pymeta.json becomes pydist.json


0.18.0

Python 3 Unicode improvements


0.17.0

Support latest PEP-426 "pymeta.json" (json-format metadata)


0.16.0

Python 2.6 compatibility bugfix (thanks John McFarlane)
Non-prerelease version number


1.0.0a2

Bugfix for C-extension tags for CPython 3.3 (using SOABI)


1.0.0a1

Bugfix for bdist_wininst converter "wheel convert"
Bugfix for dists where "is pure" is None instead of True or False


1.0.0a0

Update for version 1.0 of Wheel (PEP accepted).
Python 3 fix for moving Unicode Description to metadata body
Include rudimentary API documentation in Sphinx (thanks Kevin Horn)


0.15.0

Various improvements


0.14.0

Changed the signature format to better comply with the current JWS spec.
Breaks all existing signatures.
Include wheel unsign command to remove RECORD.jws from an archive.
Put the description in the newly allowed payload section of PKG-INFO
(METADATA) files.


0.13.0

Use distutils instead of sysconfig to get installation paths; can install
headers.
Improve WheelFile() sort.
Allow bootstrap installs without any pkg_resources.


0.12.0

Unit test for wheel.tool.install


0.11.0

API cleanup


0.10.3

Scripts fixer fix


0.10.2

Fix keygen


0.10.1

Preserve attributes on install.


0.10.0

Include a copy of pkg_resources. Wheel can now install into a virtualenv
that does not have distribute (though most packages still require
pkg_resources to actually work; wheel install distribute)
Define a new setup.cfg section [wheel]. universal=1 will
apply the py2.py3-none-any tag for pure python wheels.


0.9.7

Only import dirspec when needed. dirspec is only needed to find the
configuration for keygen/signing operations.


0.9.6

requires-dist from setup.cfg overwrites any requirements from setup.py
Care must be taken that the requirements are the same in both cases,
or just always install from wheel.
drop dirspec requirement on win32
improved command line utility, adds 'wheel convert [egg or wininst]' to
convert legacy binary formats to wheel


0.9.5

Wheel's own wheel file can be executed by Python, and can install itself:
python wheel-0.9.5-py27-none-any/wheel install ...

Use argparse; basic wheel install command should run with only stdlib
dependencies.
Allow requires_dist in setup.cfg's [metadata] section. In addition to
dependencies in setup.py, but will only be interpreted when installing
from wheel, not from sdist. Can be qualified with environment markers.


0.9.4

Fix wheel.signatures in sdist


0.9.3

Integrated digital signatures support without C extensions.
Integrated "wheel install" command (single package, no dependency
resolution) including compatibility check.
Support Python 3.3
Use Metadata 1.3 (PEP 426)


0.9.2

Automatic signing if WHEEL_TOOL points to the wheel binary
Even more Python 3 fixes


0.9.1

'wheel sign' uses the keys generated by 'wheel keygen' (instead of generating
a new key at random each time)
Python 2/3 encoding/decoding fixes
Run tests on Python 2.6 (without signature verification)


0.9

Updated digital signatures scheme
Python 3 support for digital signatures
Always verify RECORD hashes on extract
"wheel" command line tool to sign, verify, unpack wheel files


0.8

none/any draft pep tags update
improved wininst2wheel script
doc changes and other improvements


0.7

sort .dist-info at end of wheel archive
Windows & Python 3 fixes from Paul Moore
pep8
scripts to convert wininst & egg to wheel


0.6

require distribute >= 0.6.28
stop using verlib


0.5

working pretty well


0.4.2

hyphenated name fix


0.4

improve test coverage
improve Windows compatibility
include tox.ini courtesy of Marc Abramowitz
draft hmac sha-256 signing function


0.3

prototype egg2wheel conversion script


0.2

Python 3 compatibility


0.1

Initial version