manylinux

Older archives: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/manylinux-discuss

The goal of the manylinux project is to provide a convenient way to distribute binary Python extensions as wheels on Linux. This effort has produced PEP 513 (manylinux1), PEP 571 (manylinux2010), PEP 599 (manylinux2014), PEP 600 (manylinux_x_y) and PEP 656 (musllinux_x_y).

PEP 513 defined manylinux1_x86_64 and manylinux1_i686 platform tags and the wheels were built on Centos5. Centos5 reached End of Life (EOL) on March 31st, 2017.

PEP 571 defined manylinux2010_x86_64 and manylinux2010_i686 platform tags and the wheels were built on Centos6. Centos6 reached End of Life (EOL) on November 30th, 2020.

PEP 599 defines the following platform tags: manylinux2014_x86_64, manylinux2014_i686, manylinux2014_aarch64, manylinux2014_armv7l, manylinux2014_ppc64, manylinux2014_ppc64le and manylinux2014_s390x. Wheels are built on CentOS 7 which will reach End of Life (EOL) on June 30th, 2024.

PEP 600 has been designed to be "future-proof" and does not enforce specific symbols and a specific distro to build. It only states that a wheel tagged manylinux_x_y shall work on any distro based on glibc>=x.y. PEP 656 added musllinux_x_y tags for musl>=x.y.

An overview of distros per glibc version is available at pep600_compliance.

The manylinux project supports:

• manylinux2014 images for x86_64, i686, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x.
• manylinux_2_28 images for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x.
• manylinux_2_34 images for x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le and s390x.
• musllinux_1_2 images for x86_64, i686, aarch64, ppc64le, s390x and armv7l.

Wheel packages compliant with those tags can be uploaded to PyPI (for instance with twine) and can be installed with pip:

manylinux tag	Client-side pip version required	CPython (sources) version embedding a compatible pip	Distribution default pip compatibility
manylinux_x_y	pip >= 20.3	3.8.10+, 3.9.5+, 3.10.0+	ALT Linux 10+, RHEL 9+, Debian 11+, Fedora 34+, Mageia 8+, Photon OS 3.0 with updates, Ubuntu 21.04+
manylinux2014	pip >= 19.3	3.7.8+, 3.8.4+, 3.9.0+	CentOS 7 rh-python38, CentOS 8 python38, Fedora 32+, Mageia 8+, openSUSE 15.3+, Photon OS 4.0+ (3.0+ with updates), Ubuntu 20.04+
manylinux2010	pip >= 19.0	3.7.3+, 3.8.0+	ALT Linux 9+, CentOS 7 rh-python38, CentOS 8 python38, Fedora 30+, Mageia 7+, openSUSE 15.3+, Photon OS 4.0+ (3.0+ with updates), Ubuntu 20.04+
manylinux1	pip >= 8.1.0	3.5.2+, 3.6.0+	ALT Linux 8+, Amazon Linux 1+, CentOS 7+, Debian 9+, Fedora 25+, openSUSE 15.2+, Mageia 7+, Photon OS 1.0+, Ubuntu 16.04+

The various manylinux tags allow projects to distribute wheels that are automatically installed (and work!) on the vast majority of desktop and server Linux distributions.

This repository hosts several manylinux-related things:

Docker images

Building manylinux-compatible wheels is not trivial; as a general rule, binaries built on one Linux distro will only work on other Linux distros that are the same age or newer. Therefore, if we want to make binaries that run on most Linux distros, we have to use an old enough distro.

Rather than forcing you to install an old distro yourself, install Python, etc., we provide Docker images where we've done the work for you. The images are uploaded to quay.io and are tagged for repeatable builds.

manylinux_2_34 (AlmaLinux 9 based)

Caveat: On x86_64, RHEL 9+ derivatives are using x86-64-v2 target architecture. While manylinux worked around that when building from sources by intercepting compiler calls to target x86_64 instead, every library installed with dnf will most likely target the more recent x86-64-v2 which, if grafted into a wheel, will fail to run on older hardware. There's no PEP to handle micro-architecture variants yet when it comes to packaging or installing wheels. Auditwheel doesn't detect this either. See #1725

Toolchain: GCC 14

• x86_64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_34_x86_64
• aarch64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_34_aarch64
• ppc64le image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_34_ppc64le
• s390x image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_34_s390x

Built wheels are also expected to be compatible with other distros using glibc 2.34 or later, including:

• Debian 12+
• Ubuntu 21.10+
• Fedora 35+
• CentOS/RHEL 9+

manylinux_2_28 (AlmaLinux 8 based)

Toolchain: GCC 14

• x86_64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_28_x86_64
• aarch64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_28_aarch64
• ppc64le image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_28_ppc64le
• s390x image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_28_s390x

Built wheels are also expected to be compatible with other distros using glibc 2.28 or later, including:

• Debian 10+
• Ubuntu 18.10+
• Fedora 29+
• CentOS/RHEL 8+

manylinux2014 (CentOS 7 based, glibc 2.17)

Toolchain: GCC 10

• x86_64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2014_x86_64
• i686 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2014_i686
• aarch64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2014_aarch64
• ppc64le image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2014_ppc64le
• s390x image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2014_s390x

Built wheels are also expected to be compatible with other distros using glibc 2.17 or later, including:

• Debian 8+
• Ubuntu 13.10+
• Fedora 19+
• RHEL 7+

manylinux_2_24 (Debian 9 based) - EOL

Support for manylinux_2_24 has ended on January 1st, 2023.

These images have some caveats mentioned in different issues.

Toolchain: GCC 6

• x86_64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_24_x86_64
• i686 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_24_i686
• aarch64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_24_aarch64
• ppc64le image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_24_ppc64le
• s390x image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux_2_24_s390x

manylinux2010 (CentOS 6 based, glibc 2.12 - EOL)

Support for manylinux2010 has ended on August 1st, 2022.

Toolchain: GCC 8

• x86-64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_x86_64
• i686 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux2010_i686

manylinux1 (CentOS 5 based, glibc 2.5 - EOL)

Code and details regarding manylinux1 can be found in the manylinux1 tag.

Support for manylinux1 has ended on January 1st, 2022.

Toolchain: GCC 4.8

• x86-64 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux1_x86_64
• i686 image: quay.io/pypa/manylinux1_i686

musllinux_1_2 (Alpine Linux 3.20 based, 3.13+ compatible)

Toolchain: GCC 13

• x86_64 image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_2_x86_64
• i686 image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_2_i686
• aarch64 image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_2_aarch64
• ppc64le image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_2_ppc64le
• s390x image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_2_s390x
• armv7l image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_2_armv7l

musllinux_1_1 (Alpine Linux 3.12 based - EOL)

Support for musllinux_1_1 has ended on November 1st, 2024.

Toolchain: GCC 9

• x86_64 image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_1_x86_64
• i686 image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_1_i686
• aarch64 image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_1_aarch64
• ppc64le image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_1_ppc64le
• s390x image: quay.io/pypa/musllinux_1_1_s390x

All supported images are rebuilt using GitHub Actions / Travis-CI on every commit to this repository; see the docker/ directory for source code.

Image content

All supported images currently contain:

• CPython 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, 3.13, 3.13t and PyPy 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10 installed in /opt/python/<python tag>-<abi tag>. The directories are named after the PEP 425 tags for each environment -- e.g. /opt/python/cp37-cp37m contains a CPython 3.7 build, and can be used to produce wheels named like <pkg>-<version>-cp37-cp37m-<arch>.whl.

• Development packages for all the libraries that PEP 571/599 list. One should not assume the presence of any other development package.

• The following development tools, installed via pipx (which is also available):

  • auditwheel
  • cmake
  • patchelf
  • swig
  • uv (not available on musllinux ppc64le & musllinux s390x yet due to Rust limitations)

• All Python interpreters have the following packages pre-installed:

  • pip
  • build
  • packaging
  • Before Python 3.12, setuptools and wheel are also available.

• The manylinux-interpreters tool which allows to list all available interpreters & install ones missing from the image

  3 commands are available:

  • manylinux-interpreters list

    usage: manylinux-interpreters list [-h] [-v] [-i] [--format {text,json}]
    
    list available or installed interpreters
    
    options:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      -v, --verbose         display additional information (--format=text only, ignored for --format=json)
      -i, --installed       only list installed interpreters
      --format {text,json}  text is not meant to be machine readable (i.e. the format is not stable)

  • manylinux-interpreters ensure-all

    usage: manylinux-interpreters ensure-all [-h]
    
    make sure all interpreters are installed
    
    options:
      -h, --help  show this help message and exit

  • manylinux-interpreters ensure

    usage: manylinux-interpreters ensure [-h] TAG [TAG ...]
    
    make sure a list of interpreters are installed
    
    positional arguments:
      TAG         tag with format '<python tag>-<abi tag>' e.g. 'pp310-pypy310_pp73'
    
    options:
      -h, --help  show this help message and exit

Note that less common or virtually unheard of flag combinations (such as --with-pydebug (d) and --without-pymalloc (absence of m)) are not provided.

Note that starting with CPython 3.8, default sys.abiflags became an empty string: the m flag for pymalloc became useless (builds with and without pymalloc are ABI compatible) and so has been removed. (e.g. /opt/python/cp38-cp38)

Note that PyPy is not available on ppc64le & s390x or on the musllinux images.

Building Docker images

To build the Docker images, please run the following command from the current (root) directory:

$ PLATFORM=$(uname -m) POLICY=manylinux2014 COMMIT_SHA=latest ./build.sh

Please note that the default Docker build is using buildx. Other frontends can be selected by defining MANYLINUX_BUILD_FRONTEND. See build.sh for details.

Updating the requirements

The requirement files are pinned and controlled by uv compile. To update the pins, run:

$ nox -s update_python_dependencies

Updating the native dependencies

Native dependencies are all pinned in the Dockerfile. To update the pins, run the dedicated nox session. This will add a commit for each update. If you only want to see what would be updated, you can do a dry run:

$ nox -s update_native_dependencies [-- --dry-run]

Example

An example project which builds x86_64 wheels for each Python interpreter version can be found here: https://github.com/pypa/python-manylinux-demo. The repository also contains demo to build i686 and x86_64 wheels with manylinux1 tags.

This demonstrates how to use these docker images in conjunction with auditwheel to build manylinux-compatible wheels using the free travis ci continuous integration service.

(NB: for the i686 images running on a x86_64 host machine, it's necessary to run everything under the command line program linux32, which changes reported architecture in new program environment. See this example invocation)

The PEP itself

The official version of PEP 513 is stored in the PEP repository, but we also have our own copy here. This is where the PEP was originally written, so if for some reason you really want to see the full history of edits it went through, then this is the place to look.

The proposal to upgrade manylinux1 to manylinux2010 after Centos5 reached EOL was discussed in PEP 571.

The proposal to upgrade manylinux2010 to manylinux2014 was discussed in PEP 599.

The proposal for a "future-proof" manylinux_x_y definition was discussed in PEP 600.

This repo also has some analysis code that was used when putting together the original proposal in the policy-info/ directory.

If you want to read the full discussion that led to the original policy, then lots of that is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/manylinux-discuss

The distutils-sig archives for January 2016 also contain several threads.

Code of Conduct

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