Python Wheels for the Raspberry Pi
piwheels is a Python package repository providing Arm platform wheels (pre-compiled binary Python packages) specifically for the Raspberry Pi, making pip installations much faster. Packages are natively compiled on Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 hardware using the Mythic Beasts Pi cloud.
Configuration
Raspberry Pi OS
includes configuration for pip
to use piwheels by default, which lives at /etc/pip.conf:
[global] extra-index-url=https://www.piwheels.org/simple
With this simple configuration change, pip
should now search piwheels for built distributions of packages and use
them in preference to building from source. You can test this out by
creating a virtual environment and attempting to install scipy which usually involves a fairly
lengthy compilation:
$ sudo apt install virtualenv python3-virtualenv -y $ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3 testpip $ source testpip/bin/activate (testpip) $ pip install scipy ... (testpip) $ deactivate $ rm -rf testpip/
Support
Wheels provided support all Raspberry Pi models (as of October 2023). Our wheels are only
supported under 32-bit (armhf) Raspberry Pi OS, and only for the version of
Python provided by each OS release:
| Raspberry Pi OS version | Python version | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Jessie | Python 3.4 | |
| Stretch | Python 3.5 | |
| Buster | Python 3.7 | |
| Bullseye | Python 3.9 | |
| Bookworm | Python 3.11 |
See each package's project page for information on available wheels, and see the FAQ for more technical details.