Introduction to Python wheel

Python’s first mainstream packaging format was the .egg file. Now there’s a new format in town called the wheel (.whl). According to the Python Packaging Index’s description, a wheelis designed to contain all the files for a PEP 376 compatible install in a way that is very close to the on-disk format*. In this chapter, we will learn how to create a wheel and then install our wheel in a virtualenv.

Getting Started

Using pip is the recommended way to work with wheels. Make sure you have installed the latest copy of pip as older versions did not support the wheel format. If you’re not sure if you have the latest pip, you can run the following command: