Install auditwheel with Homebrew, dnf, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• auditwheel

Project history

The auditwheel GitHub repository was created in January 2016, and PyPI records the first 1.0.0 upload on 2016-01-21. The README describes it as a tool for auditing and relabeling Linux and Android wheels.

PEP 513, the manylinux1 proposal, explicitly introduced auditwheel as a command-line executable able to inspect wheel dependencies and automatically copy external shared libraries into wheels, update RPATH, and add suitable platform tags. Later policy work, especially PEP 600, kept auditwheel as the practical implementation guide while avoiding making it the normative definition of manylinux itself.

Adoption history

auditwheel became part of the expected PyPI release workflow for projects shipping compiled extensions on Linux: build in a manylinux container, run auditwheel show to inspect shared-library dependencies, then run auditwheel repair to vendor allowed libraries and retag the wheel. The PyPA packaging guide lists auditwheel across manylinux standards, and the supplied package facts show Homebrew, Fedora, and Nix packaging.

How it is used

The README documents two main commands. auditwheel show reports external shared libraries and symbol-version compatibility against manylinux policies. auditwheel repair copies required external libraries into the wheel, rewrites RPATH entries, and emits a repaired wheel with manylinux tags.

Why package nerds care

auditwheel is package-nerd core infrastructure because it encodes the uncomfortable boundary between Python packaging metadata, ELF linking, glibc symbol versions, containerized build images, and PyPI installer compatibility. It is the tool maintainers reach for when a wheel works on the build host but needs to work across Linux distributions.

Timeline

• 2016: auditwheel repository was created and 1.0.0 was uploaded to PyPI.
• 2016: PEP 513 approved manylinux1 and described auditwheel as the repair/audit tool.
• 2018: manylinux2010 was approved through PEP 571.
• 2019: manylinux2014 was approved through PEP 599.
• 2019: PEP 600 approved perennial manylinux_x_y tags.
• 2021: musllinux tags were approved through PEP 656 and later supported in the same ecosystem.

Related projects

• auditwheel is closely tied to PyPA's manylinux container images, pip's platform tag compatibility logic, wheel metadata, patchelf, PEP 513, PEP 571, PEP 599, PEP 600, and the packaging.python.org platform compatibility tag specification.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/pypa/auditwheel
• https://github.com/pypa/auditwheel#readme
• https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/specifications/platform-compatibility-tags/
• https://peps.python.org/pep-0513/
• https://peps.python.org/pep-0600/
• https://pypi.org/pypi/auditwheel/json